A practicum was designed to provide a program for a small group of fifth- and sixth-grade Hispanic girls to develop their awareness of nontraditional career options, gender role stereotyping and decision-making skills. This program was offered in an elementary school located in the suburbs of a major southwestern city. Self-esteem, assertiveness,…

The purposes of this study were: to examine the terms "intrinsic motivation" and "extrinsic motivation" by defining and analyzing characteristics of each; to investigate their relevance to classroom practice; and to determine if students' motivational orientations can be changed. A modified version of Harter's Self-Report Scale…

This booklet (one of a series of 10 booklets in a reading project to benefit Kosair Children's Hospital in Louisville, Kentucky) contains 10 stories especially written for sixth graders by educators. The stories are about: a student's coping with a terminal illness and its effect on his classmates; a boy's feelings about his rheumatoid arthritis;…

The Comprehensive Test of Basic Skills (CTBS) results of 81 West Virginia home-schooled children in grades 3, 6, 9, and 11 were analyzed. Means of each sub-section of these CTBS scores were analyzed for significant differences from the West Virginia public school means for the respective grades and subsections. Families of the children tested…

Two programs for providing distance tutoring for at-risk elementary school children were implemented and evaluated in successive years. Each program employed 10 graduate education students as tutors for approximately 25 sixth-grade children, i.e., 2-3 tutees per student. Tutoring exercises were oriented around writing and language skills…

A drug abuse prevention curriculum for middle school students in grades five through eight is presented in this document, one of a series that is designed to provide educators with the curricular tools necessary to challenge students to take personal responsibility for their health. Each of the 11 lessons includes information of the lesson…

During the 1979-1980 school year, 23 Old Order Amish pupils in the Pleasant Hill School near Bloomfield, Iowa, took the Iowa Test of Basic Skills. On the language arts subtest, five of six third grade students ranked above 50% in capitalization, four ranked above 50% in spelling and punctuation, and three ranked above 50% in usage. Four third…

This handbook is part of a series of three, corresponding to the three grades (4, 6, and 8) at which Mastery Tests are administered. This publication was written as a resource for teachers developing mathematics programs for students in grades 4, 5, and 6. The Mastery Test in Mathematics at Grade 6 assesses student performance for 36 instructional…

This document provides a description of the competitions involved in the Mathematics Olympics held in the Springfield Public Schools (Missouri). It provides descriptions of the team events (which involved a scavenger hunt, computers, and computations) and the individual events (which involved applied geometry, calculators, conversion from ratio to…

Based on a review of the research literature, this paper gives a rationale and guidelines for a sixth-grade literature-enriched reading program. The first part looks at social trends and alternative points of view with respect to the problem of those social trends. The second section presents the rationale and the literature review. The third…

This research examined the impact of the Apple Classrooms of Tomorrow (ACOT) project on seventh grade students in the year following their ACOT participation in sixth grade. Subjects were 24 former ACOT students and 29 matched control students, all of whom had attended sixth grade at the same school. All subjects were minority students…

Developed as part of the Minimum Performance Testing Program (MPT), these item specifications for sixth grade language arts are designed to provide an overview of the general content and format of test items used to measure instructional objectives. Each item specification contains the following information: objective identification number; grade…

This paper examines sixth-grade children's thinking related to solving ratio and proportion problems before these children had received any instruction in the domain. It explores unitizing and norming, one of the processes identified by both content analyses (Behr, Harel, Post, & Lesh, 1990); Harel, Behr, Post & Lesh, 1990) and research in…

These item specifications were developed as a part of the Arkansas "Minimum Performance Testing Program" (MPT). There is one item specification for each instructional objective included in the MPT. The purpose of an item specification is to provide an overview of the general content and format of test items used to measure an…

Dialogue journals, notebooks in which students communicate individually with the teacher on whatever topics they choose, can be both an important way to develop second language ability and a method of integrating language and classroom management. This is particularly true in a multicultural classroom, since the dialogue journals can help the…