This article describes how researchers take a multidisciplinary approach to investigating how middle grades students learn science vocabulary. The authors investigated teaching strategies for increasing retention of science vocabulary with seventh graders and stumbled upon an interesting finding that was not even a target for their study, yet it…

This study investigated middle school students' conceptual understanding of algebraic equations. Participants in the study--257 sixth- and seventh-grade students--were asked to solve one set of algebraic equations and to generate story problems corresponding with another set of equations. Structural aspects of the equations, including the number…