The first objective of this study was to establish to what extent metacognitive skill development is associated with intelligence. As a second objective, the generality vs. domain-specificity of maturing metacognitive skills was investigated. Both issues have major implications for the training and transferability of metacognitive skills.…

Motivation effort is one of the critical components that enable students to engage in the process of ill-structured problem solving. This article chronicles the development and evaluation of a motivation-supported problem-solving environment promoting learning goals. The environment was created by developing learning-goal oriented contexts that…

This study describes the influences that one professional learning community had on teacher resilience, teacher retention, and school reform initiatives. Teachers at a low performing, urban middle school in the Southeastern United States implemented professional learning communities as a reform initiative to assist with staff development. This…

The present study tested the assumption of a positive and linear relation between years of schooling and school learning in the Philippine setting. It replicated a 1976 study that had cast doubt on this assumption in the Philippine public educational system. It tested three competing hypotheses for that finding: common sense, the 1976 arrested…

This study compared two approaches for teaching sixth-grade middle school students to solve math problems in math, technology education, and special education classrooms. A total of 17 students with disabilities and 76 students without disabilities were taught using either enhanced anchored instruction (EAI) or text-based instruction coupled with…

Objective: To examine mother-child dietary concordance that may contribute to healthy eating practices critical to cancer prevention in underserved rural families. Methods: A brief food frequency questionnaire was administered to 404 sixth-graders and their mothers in rural Virginia and New York. Results: Significant dietary fat concordance rates…

The research examined the influence of parent and school variables on minor aggression among early adolescents. Sixth-grade students (N = 1,081) were interviewed at the beginning of the school year (Time 1) about aggressive behaviors and selected psychosocial variables and at the end of the year (Time 2) about aggressive behaviors. Aggression…

This study aimed at verifying whether a specific program on writing self-efficacy, designed to train the four sources of self-efficacy suggested by Bandura (1997), could improve not only productivity and quality of writing composition in students with LD and their processes of writing, but also their writing self-efficacy beliefs and other…

How does one turn a class of sixth graders who are uncomfortable with writing, unfamiliar with art supplies, but good at fidgeting and bickering, into a community that achieves literary, artistic, and civic success? In the spring of 2003, Kestrel Heights teachers asked the authors to team up and help their sixth grade students create something…

The middle level years are an important period of transition for adolescents. Middle level students have giant hearts--they want to save the world, and they are learning how to reach outside of themselves to empathize and care about others. At Millburn Middle School in New Jersey, where the author is principal, staff members found a way to help…

As language learning involves the acquisition of thousands of words, teachers and learners alike would like to know how vocabulary learning can be fostered, especially in EFL settings where learners frequently acquire impoverished lexicons, despite years of formal study. Research indicates that reading is important but not sufficient for…

This article discusses an action research study on how an integrated project-based curriculum could enhance students' learning of mathematics and social studies content. "A Tale of Two Cities" a thematic unit, which was developed and used with three classes of sixth-grade mathematics students (95 total) as part of the study. Results shows that "A…

In this article, the authors recount their experience designing a program for one of their restructured middle schools that reflects a national movement in middle level reform. Inspired by Howard Garner's (1993) theory of multiple intelligences, the authors, together with a team of teachers, administrators and parents in their small mid-western…

Numerous studies have demonstrated a decrease in the expression of internality in French sixth graders as compared to fifth graders. The present study examines normative clearsightedness in addition to internality across four French school grades (fourth to seventh). The results confirmed the sixth-grade drop in internality and showed that the…

The purpose of this qualitative case study was to explore how five middle school students examined humor and characterization used in adolescent literature according to Louise Rosenblatt's (1995) reader response transactional theory. The study was conducted with a focus group of five 6th-grade students, three girls and two boys, from a public…