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This study explored implementation of the middle school concept (MSC) in Illinois middle-level schools, examining relationships between MSC implementation and schools' relative wealth, racial/ethnic composition, and achievement levels.

This quantitative study utilized a sample of 137 Illinois middle-level schools, defined as containing any combination of grades 5–9, including at least two consecutive grade levels and grade 7. Principals completed an online survey, identifying levels of implementation of advisory, teaming with common planning time (CPT), and a composite of both advisory and teaming with CPT.

Schools with high advisory implementation had significantly higher rates of Latinx enrollments. Schools with lower operating expenditures per pupil were significantly less likely to implement advisory or advisory and teaming. Teaming had a significant relationship with composite PARCC test scores, but there was no significant effect for advisory and no significant interaction of advisory and teaming together.

MSC is more expensive to implement, and affluent districts may have the financial means to absorb these costs. Although teaming facilitated improved state test scores, advisory programming did not result in significantly improved scores.

Lack of access to MSC programming in less affluent communities presents an equity issue for low-income students and students of color.

This study contributes to research examining underlying issues of race and poverty and their effects on academic achievement and the effectiveness of the MSC.

Dramatic cultural shifts driven by technological innovations beg for a reenvisioning of responsive education for young adolescents. Through the voices of theorists, educators, and students, the authors initiate a dialogue about technology's role in purposeful learning and relevant curriculum; a supportive learning culture for students, family, and community; and bold and innovative school leadership. The analysis yields practical ways in which technology can contribute to effective middle schooling and paints a vivid picture of technology-rich and responsive learning environments for young adolescents.

Arts-integration is a promising approach to building students’ abilities to create and critique arguments with data, also known as informal inferential reasoning (IIR). However, differences in disciplinary practices and routines, as well as school organization and culture, can pose barriers to subject integration. The purpose of this study is to describe synergies and tensions between data science and the arts, and how these can create or constrain opportunities for learners to engage in IIR.

The authors co-designed and implemented four arts-integrated data literacy units with 10 teachers of arts and mathematics in middle school classrooms from four different schools in the USA. The data include student-generated artwork and their written rationales, and interviews with teachers and students. Through maximum variation sampling, the authors identified examples from the data to illustrate disciplinary synergies and tensions that appeared to support different IIR processes among students.

Aspects of artistic representation, including embodiment, narrative and visual image; and aspects of the culture of arts, including an emphasis on personal experience, the acknowledgement of subjectivity and considerations for the audience’s perspective, created synergies and tensions that both offered and hindered opportunities for IIR (i.e. going beyond data, using data as evidence and expressing uncertainty).

This study answers calls for humanistic approaches to data literacy education. It contributes an interdisciplinary perspective on data literacy that complements other context-oriented perspectives on data science. This study also offers recommendations for how designers and educators can capitalize on synergies and mitigate tensions between domains to promote successful IIR in arts-integrated data literacy education.

The purpose of this paper is to propose and demonstrate an evidence‐based scenario design framework for assessment‐based computer games.

The evidence‐based scenario design framework is presented and demonstrated by using BELLA, a new assessment‐based gaming environment aimed at supporting student learning of vocabulary and math. BELLA integrates assessment and learning into an interactive gaming system that includes written conversations, math activities, oral and written feedback in both English and Spanish, and a visible psychometric model that is used to adaptively select activities as well as feedback levels. This paper also reports on a usability study carried out in a public middle school in New York City.

The evidence‐based, scenario design framework proves to be instrumental in helping combine game and assessment requirements. BELLA demonstrates how advances in artificial intelligence in education, cognitive science, educational measurement, and video games can be harnessed and integrated into valid instructional tools for the classroom.

This paper provides initial evidence of the potential of these kinds of assessment‐based gaming tools to enhance teaching and learning. Future work involves exploring student learning effects in randomized controlled studies and comparing the internal assessment models to more traditional assessment instruments.

BELLA is the first step toward achieving engaging, assessment‐based, gaming environments for a variety of Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM)‐related areas with explicit support for English language learners.

This chapter traces the career trajectories of the teachHOUSTON science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) teachers since the inception of the program. It asks whether the National Science Foundation (NSF) investment of millions of dollars in STEM education produced more STEM teachers of high quality for the diverse, urban area. The chapter is filled with descriptive statistics and stories. Two major findings are that the teachHOUSTON program produced double-digit physics teachers when the Greater Houston area had not had a freshly prepared physics teacher in over a decade. Additionally, teachHOUSTON graduates have distinguished themselves by being named recipients of several awards such as beginning teacher of the year awards, district teacher of the year awards, among other distinctions. teachHOUSTON alumni are also serving in a variety of leadership capacities for high-need public school districts. The chapter ends with a discussion of the program's strengths as well as the areas in which it continues to grow. Three new NSF grants allow for continued improvement and transition this work into two additional books proposed in this three-volume series.

There are two factors essential to collection development and management in any library or information center. The first is an explicit statement of the organization's goals. The second is the size of the materials budget—the financial resources provided to achieve the goals. Professional literature includes a profusion of information dealing with the selection process for school library media centers, but very little is available about materials budgets. A clear, practical and rational procedure needs to be developed to help school librarians determine how much funding is necessary to fulfill the school library media center's goals.

This study investigates teacher receptivity to a proposal to relocate Year 7 primary classes to secondary schools in the Western Australia Catholic school system. The proposal has not yet either been formally promulgated to schools, parents and students or adopted by the Catholic Education Commission. A general model of teacher receptivity to a major planned change in a centralised education system, during the adoption stage, was used to guide the study. The dependent variable, receptivity, was measured in two aspects ‐ an evaluative attitude and behaviour intentions. Three independent variables, general beliefs about the secondary school and perceived readiness to leave primary school, perceived practicality of the change, and the perception that fears and concerns associated with the change will be alleviated, were measured. The environment in which teachers work was measured through the teacher (age, gender, experience, area of expertise and school size) and the school (primary or secondary, size and location), as situation variables, related to the independent variables. Receptivity was found to be strongly and positively related to the perceived practicality of the change and moderately, positively related to perceived readiness of Year 7 students for secondary school. The results are combined with other studies to provide advice to educational administrators about how to adopt and manage this proposed change.

My intellectual journey as a sociologist and a symbolic interactionist began when I was a 13-year-old eighth-grader in Catholic School on the working-class, southwest side of Chicago. My eighth-grade nun pulled me aside after school one day and gently told me that, now that I should think about what to be when I grow up. She suggested I study to be “either a sociologist or a priest.” After some serious thought, I eliminated the option of becoming a priest – yet, the word sociologist was intriguing. I had no idea what it really meant, but it had a certain ring to it in 1960, when society was becoming a viable and visible orientation in terms of major events we were learning a little bit about from the good nuns and television – like civil rights, the cold war, and the space race. I took her advice and set out on a 50-year journey to become a sociologist. The map of the journey has been elusive, though, in that what it means to be a sociologist – especially an interactionist sociologist – has changed over the years as events in my life and the social world have evolved. This journey has had three segments: sociology as something to do; sociology as something to know; and sociology as something to be. The journey has been profound as well as fun because, as I continue to discover what it means to be an interactionist sociologist, I discover who I am.

The effective use of student data has gained increasing attention in the past 10 years. Although district leaders would like to support data use and improvement, exactly how to go about such work systemically is often unclear. Accordingly, the aim of this chapter is to illuminate the inner workings of data use throughout a mid-sized school district. In doing so, we highlight issues in how data were used and supported, and provide discussion about how districts such as this one may improve data use throughout the district.

Nobody concerned with political economy can neglect the history of economic doctrines. Structural changes in the economy and society influence economic thinking and, conversely, innovative thought structures and attitudes have almost always forced economic institutions and modes of behaviour to adjust. We learn from the history of economic doctrines how a particular theory emerged and whether, and in which environment, it could take root. We can see how a school evolves out of a common methodological perception and similar techniques of analysis, and how it has to establish itself. The interaction between unresolved problems on the one hand, and the search for better solutions or explanations on the other, leads to a change in paradigma and to the formation of new lines of reasoning. As long as the real world is subject to progress and change scientific search for explanation must out of necessity continue.