The National Middle School Association (NMSA) has long offered excellent guidance on the education of young adolescents in the "This We Believe" series, and by extension, for the education of educators of young adolescents. With many districts facing shortages of qualified teachers, having difficulty retaining those they have, and with an…

This article describes the middle grades teacher preparation program at Augusta State University in Georgia. It describes the negotiation between the middle school concept and the standardized testing culture of the local schools as the faculty redesigned the undergraduate middle grades program to adequately address both. Ways in which new…

Objectives: To evaluate the impact of school-based mentoring for adolescents (11-18 years) on academic performance, attendance, attitudes, behavior, and self-esteem. Method: A systematic review and meta-analysis. The authors searched 12 databases from 1980 to 2011. Eight studies with 6,072 participants were included, 6 were included in…

This article discusses the importance of mixed-methods research, in particular the value of qualitatively driven mixed-methods research for quantitatively driven domains like educational accountability. The article demonstrates the merits of qualitative thinking by describing a mixed-methods study that focuses on a middle school's system of…

This article presents findings from a study that explores the nature of the Cyberethics, Cybersafety, and Cybersecurity (C3) educational awareness policies, initiatives, curriculum, and practices currently taking place in the U.S. public and private K-12 educational settings. The study establishes baseline data on C3 awareness, which can be used…

When the Strategic Education Research Partnership (SERP) began working with Boston Public Schools (BPS) in 2005, the most pressing need articulated by the district was research and development in the area of middle school literacy. Thus SERP researchers undertook to specify more precisely what the middle school literacy problem in BPS was by…

The purpose of the evaluation was to evaluate two alternative programs in a North Carolina (NC) and South Carolina (SC) public school district to determine if they are effective in delivering constructive interventions that modify student behavior once students have left the programs and have returned to their regular learning environments. This…

The National Wildlife Federation engaged in a two-year partnership with AISD to build and maintain outdoor learning habitats for elementary and middle school campuses. This report summarizes the findings from the year 2 program evaluation (academic year 2011-2012), focusing on teacher perceptions and curriculum considerations as well as the actual…

This paper is based on an online graduate program for middle school science and mathematics teachers in Texas titled Integration of Science, Mathematics and Reflective Teaching (iSMART). Launching the program for its first cohort in fall 2010, the authors attempted to answer the following two questions in this paper: (a) How do the members of the…

This is the second and final report of the Middle School Mathematics Professional Development Impact Study, which examines the impact of providing a professional development (PD) program in rational number topics to seventh-grade mathematics teachers. An interim report (Garet et al. 2010) described the findings after one year of PD. The current…

The National Wildlife Federation and AISD engaged in a project to build outdoor learning classrooms on middle school and elementary school campuses. Teachers participated in a half-day Appreciative Inquiry Summit during the second year of the partnership. This report describes teachers' reflections and aspirations for the Schoolyard Habitats they…

The potential for music programs to promote psychosocial wellbeing in mainstream schools is recognised in both policy and research literature. Despite this recognition, there is a dearth of consistent research evidence supporting this link. Authors attribute this lack of consistent evidence to limitations in the areas of research design and…

This article describes the rationale and design of The Reduction of Stigma in Schools--an innovative professional development program that aims to empower educators to create supportive learning environments for LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer) students. Part of a larger evaluation study, the authors illustrate how the core…

Teacher education in Norway is nationally regulated and is currently undergoing extensive changes. This paper briefly outlines the various education routes for teachers and some of the ongoing work to improve teacher education, but concentrates mainly on the reform that has come the farthest: initial teacher education for grades 1-7 and grades…

This single case study (Yin, 2009) compares an established urban physical education/ sport/physical activity program with two models: Comprehensive School Physical Activity Program/CSPAP (AAHPERD, 2013; CDC, 2013); and Lawson's propositions (2005) for sport, exercise and physical education for empowerment and community development to determine…