At Mayfield Middle School, in order to create personalized and more meaningful learning experiences for the students, it was realized that a typical, traditional schedule was not always conducive to the types of learning experiences teachers wanted to create. Teachers had great ideas for projects and practices that would incorporate more critical…

In this article, the author shares her experience with a student whose parents had immigrated from China. One parent spoke English, but the other parent did not--which led to them sometimes feeling isolated from their child's educational experience. This understanding enabled the author to adapt her school's communication methods to better meet…

Engineering design practices in STEM education focus on reflecting the discipline-specific work of engineers in a manner that is suitable for the student level and course learning objectives. Using an engineering design context also facilitates student identification of global problems and feasible solutions to address such problems. In this…

A recent national survey of middle grades education examined the perceptions of middle grades educators about middle grades organizational structures and instructional practices. Although the results suggested declining implementation of middle grades practices, it also highlighted educators still valued middle school philosophy and indicated a…

Recent trends in agricultural education have demonstrated that the number of middle school programs and students has been increasing. Despite this, middle school agricultural education students, teachers, and programs have been underserved. For example, middle school agricultural education teachers lack the training and resources to meet the needs…

This evaluation brief describes how a district in receivership (state takeover) invested in PBIS to (a) enhance their systems to support staff, (b) implement evidence-based practices to support students, (c) use data to guide their implementation, and (d) ensure equitable supports for all students, including students with disabilities, to…

Whole-school reforms have received widespread attention, but a critical limitation of the current literature is the lack of evidence around whether these extensive and costly interventions improve students' long-term outcomes after they leave reform schools. Leveraging Tennessee's statewide turnaround reforms, we use difference-in-differences…

School districts increasingly gauge school quality with surveys that ask about school climate and student engagement. We use data from New York City's middle and high schools to compare the long-run predictive validity of surveys with that of conventional test score value-added models (VAMs). Our analysis leverages the New York school match, which…

As the youth mental health crisis continues to worsen, there is a need for more evidence-based social-emotional interventions that can be applied in schools -- the setting in which youth are most likely to seek and receive mental health treatment (Simon et al., 2015). Further, exploring ways to culturally adapt interventions for marginalized…

The purpose of this study was to understand the implementation and impact of the New Teacher Center's (NTC) strategies for scaling its validated induction model to 301 schools in five school districts serving high proportions of students of color and students from low-income households. SRI's evaluation of the implementation and impact of NTC's i3…

Background: School mental health literacy programs, delivered at the universal level, are key to promoting positive behavioral health for all youth. Successfully implementing these programs requires adaptation to ensure the programs are aligned with contextual demands of the schools in which they are implemented. Yet, little is known about how to…

Disease ecology classes were conducted at two residential middle school summer camps held at a university--a camp for local youth who paid tuition and a free camp for youth from statewide underserved communities including Native, low-income, and rural. Disease ecology is defined as the ecological study of host-pathogen interactions within the…

The purpose of the study was to better understand how professional self-efficacy is related to the support school administrators provide and receive. Using a sequential, mixed-methods research design, middle- and high-school administrators serving in a metropolitan school district located in a southeastern U.S. city participated in a research…

This study examines gender representation in middle school music textbooks in mainland China, aiming to explore portrayals of male and female musicians and potential biases within music education. Inspired by China's recent commitment to gender equality as outlined in its legal and educational policies, this research scrutinises the gender…

Despite evidence that informational interventions can influence K-12 school choices, we know little about the mechanisms through which they work and the factors that produce heterogeneity in student responses. Through a school-level randomized controlled trial conducted in 473 New York City middle schools serving 115,000 eighth graders, we…