This practicum was designed to increase the positive experiences of middle school minority students entering a suburban community. The problem for racial and ethnic minorities is how to have full access to and participation in the educational life of the community without surrendering their language and cultural distinctiveness. The goals of this…

A practicum used computers to improve the use of standard English and the attitude towards writing of a group of middle school students in a predominantly Nicaraguan neighborhood in a large metropolitan area. The project was directed towards 32 sixth- to eighth-graders of average ability who were enrolled in an introductory computer…

Developing self-motivated, empowered middle school students is an ongoing struggle for teachers and administrators. This practicum was designed to address the problem teachers have in finding specific teaching strategies that would help students become empowered and self-motivated learners. This study focuses on directly integrating techniques…

This practicum was designed to meet the needs of elementary school students making the transition to middle school. Incoming grade 6 students from five K-5 feeder schools were receiving insufficient articulation from the new middle school to permit them to make a smooth transition. An intervention program was developed and instituted which…

The purpose of this practicum was to resolve conflict in a peaceful and constructive manner in the sixth-grade. Students participated in a conflict resolution and peer mediation program designed to enable friendships to grow and to reduce the number of violent acts within the school setting. Thirty students initially began in the program. During…

A practium study sought to improve the confidence, clarity, and fluency of 115 seventh graders' public speaking skills. Students' public speaking skills were evaluated before and after the practicum by rotating peer review committees of three students each. The first month the practicum focused on self-esteem and a study of the history and…

Preparing students for high school is only one of the many functions of middle school. It is expected that by this time children would have acquired the behaviors necessary to interact appropriately with peers and adults. This practicum was designed to help the low achieving and the learning disabled student (SLD) acquire appropriate social…

Noting the need for parents, schools, and community members to work together to meet the needs of unsupervised adolescents during after-school hours, this practicum was designed to address those needs in one middle school. Lack of adolescent after-school supervision was documented by means of a parent interest survey distributed to parents of…

This practicum was designed to use directed reading thinking activity strategies to teach reading comprehension skills to middle grades language arts students who frequently failed to make passing scores in reading comprehension exercises. The program included three specific strategies. The first strategy was to teach the students higher-order…

This practicum paper reports on an effort to address the problem of acting-out, withdrawn, and immature behavior of 15 middle-school special education students during social skills instruction. Classroom behavior-rating checklists, discipline reports, and a student survey provided evidence that these behaviors occurred more during social skills…

There are potentially successful students who are failing one or more subjects every year. Many students are spending more than the normal 3 years at the middle school level because of this failure. A program was designed to increase the self-esteem, motivation, and interest of at-risk students, thereby improving their grades. A second aim was to…

Student Study Teams were established at the middle and junior high school levels to address the needs of at-risk students not being served by special education programs. Also, communication and cooperation between existing Student Study Teams (SST) and other referral teams had been lacking and needed to be improved. The goals were to strengthen…

This practicum reports on a project designed to improve middle school students' science scores. The project used three general strategies to improve science learning: (1) the inclusion of multiple hands-on activities and techniques in the science classroom; (2) the implementation of portfolio assessment; and (3) the inclusion of a Multiple…

This practicum was designed to reduce student apathy toward learning through the presentation of workshops and the conducting of collegial networking sessions in an effort to give teachers a broad base of strategies and interdisciplinary approaches that were intrinsically motivating to students. Four training workshops were designed and…

A practicum described a strategy involving the integration of computer software reading games with traditional printed texts to improve student reading scores and attitudes toward reading. A target group of five seventh-grade remedial reading students participated in the study. The two computer software programs, "Super Solvers Midnight…