The retrospective report summarizes results and recommendations resulting from the Oregon Community Foundation's Student Mentoring Program (SMP), which brought together college students from four private universities and a number of eighth grade students from four middle schools in mentoring relationships. The students were originally defined as…

The guidance and counseling department of a western North Carolina middle school wanted to identify more precisely what it was that a week's participation in Outward Bound provided for their students. Outward Bound is an adventure-based, or wilderness-based, educational experience that promotes self-esteem through achievement in a challenging…

This paper explores the implications of an effort to promote service learning in two middle schools in the Palo Alto (California) Unified School District. The schools are grades six through eight with about 1,000 students in each. The paper describes seven service efforts and then analyzes the costs and benefits of these projects. The study…

Students should be welcomed as active participants in parent-teacher conferences, facilitating their conferences and sharing their academic progress with their parents and teachers. Concerned with the shortcomings of the traditional conference model, faculty at a Kansas City, Missouri, middle school developed a student-led conference model…

Focusing on predictors of academic success may help in the design of effective educational interventions. This study explores the enhancement of education for at-risk minority students by considering educationally resilient students and the classroom learning environment. Data was collected from six middle schools in a multi-ethnic school district…

This paper reports on research in the analysis of high school and middle school students' appropriation of the Research Article genre in science classes. The appropriation of this rhetorical form is proposed as a measure of students' understanding of adult argumentative practice in science and the effectiveness of a learning environment in…

This document examines how a unit on model rockets, designed to be a "hands-on" activity within the "Mission to Mars" curriculum that was implemented in the Nashville (Tennessee) area middle schools, has been used to investigate children's understanding of experimentation. A literature review explores some of the traditional…

Students from the United States were compared with similar students from South Korea regarding their attitudes toward school, their perceived responsibility for learning, and their perceived relationships with teachers. Data were collected from 305 female and 301 male students in grades 7-12 in Korean middle schools and high schools through the…

This practicum was designed to ensure that junior high students with learning disabilities experience a successful transition back into the regular classroom from the resource room. The focus was on increasing communication between the regular classroom teacher and the resource room teacher, evaluating transition candidates using a…

Theoretical tools from cognitive science were used to put together a framework for a fine-grained theory of how students learn elementary algebra in the classroom. Developing the framework included assessing the shortcomings of current models, evaluating whether unified theories of cognition can be adapted for learning mathematics in the…

This document describes the With and For Parents program, a dropout prevention program focusing on parent involvement. Although not a conventional guidebook, this document can serve as a guide to the world of the urban disadvantaged through its recollection of program experiences. With and For Parents began in 1987 with 156 families of incoming…

To begin to implement a multimedia teaching and learning component in the teacher education curriculum of the University of Wyoming (Laramie), a pilot study was conducted in the summer of 1992 to attempt to identify teaching and learning issues related to computer-enhanced multimedia instructional platforms. Subjects were seven middle school or…

The Accelerated Schools Project has the overall purpose of creating the best schools for all children so that every child has the opportunity to become a creative, critical, and productive member of society. The project represents a philosophy and a process for transforming conventional schools into accelerated ones where powerful learning…

The Learner-Centered Battery (LCB) is a set of short self-assessment tools for teachers and their students that can help teachers identify profiles of effective beliefs, practices, and discrepancies between teacher and student perspectives. Personalized feedback is available for interpreting individual profiles relative to profiles of the most…

For the fourth straight year, responding to an open-ended question, more 12- to 17-year olds named drugs the most important problem they face than named social pressures, violence, crime, or any other issue. One of a continuing series, this survey of teens, teachers, and principals is an attempt to increase understanding of the causes and effects…