The purpose of this study was to investigate the ways middle school students utilized visual photographing literacies during a participatory action research project as they jointly investigated factors that support and/or hinder students' academic success. Research questions included: (a) How do Sage Middle School (pseudonym) students perceive…

The purpose of this short-term longitudinal quantitative study was to gain a comprehensive understanding of the influence of teacher autonomy support and structure on young adolescents' academic motivation, classroom engagement, school belonging, and achievement. Middle school students (N = 209, 61% female) self-reported perceptions of teacher…

The Advancement Via Individual Determination (AVID) program has been preparing students who are first generation. college-going students from subgroups traditionally underrepresented in higher education, and students from lower socioeconomic families for college and careers since 1980. The present study investigated the success of middle school…

Researchers examined teacher-related variation in the effects of a classroom intervention designed to impact seventh graders' beliefs about the nature of ability in science as fixed or malleable. Analyses of quantitative data from 7 science classrooms across 2 teachers revealed significant teacher effects in the extent to which students' beliefs…

The present study examined the extent to which middle school students' (N = 90) learning strategies mediated the relationship between their motivational orientations and academic achievement. Survey data revealed that higher degrees of intrinsic motivation predicted the use of both deep and surface learning strategies, whereas higher degrees of…

The development and implementation of a comprehensive and systemic career development program, The Career Institute, provided the mechanism through which one school community addressed students' career development and college readiness needs while also attending to their academic and personal-social development. The Career Institute consisted of a…

Middle school students perform well academically when their schooling environment meets their developmental needs (Eccles et al., 1993). Both school culture and student-teacher relationships are influential aspects of the school environment that impact academic expectations, school satisfaction, and academic performance. In the current study, we…

When students enter middle school, they face 2 major challenges, one involving the biological, cognitive, and socioemotional changes they are going through, and another involving the transition from elementary to middle school. Peer learning has considerable influence on how well they manage these challenges. The research that exists on peer…

Using data from the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988 (NELS:88), path analytic procedures were performed to test a model of the effects of parent and peer encouragement to take algebra on the mathematics achievement of eighth grade students. The effects of socio-economic status (SES) on middle school algebra course-taking and…

African American youth are characterized as experiencing declining academic motivation and engagement while simultaneously maintaining optimism for their future success. Thus, researchers hypothesize academic motivation to be a negative factor for educational aspirations when applied to an urban sample of African American middle school students (N…

Associations between reading achievement and behavior, albeit problematic, are empirically supported in the literature. Although well documented, many of the studies were conducted outside of the school context using reading measures not typically aligned with school curricula. Furthermore, previous studies primarily document the existence of…

This article explores the gendered lives of students and how, in their eyes, gender stereotypes continue to be a major part of their world. Four hundred forty students in five diverse middle schools were surveyed about the advantages and drawbacks of each sex. Specifically, students were asked via a questionnaire to write a brief description of…

This article examines the implementation and effectiveness of Middle Start, a regional, comprehensive school reform design, focused specifically on middle-grade schools and young adolescents. Utilizing individual school self-study data and employing a quasi-experimental design, factors such as the implementation of interdisciplinary teaming…