Background: Whereas dating violence among high school students has been linked with sexual risk-taking and substance use, this association has been understudied among early adolescents. We estimated the prevalence of physical and nonphysical dating violence in a sample of middle school students and examined associations between dating violence,…

The moment-to-moment dynamics of student discourse plays a large role in students' enacted mathematics identities. Discourse analysis was used to describe meaningful discursive patterns in the interactions of 2 students in a 7th-grade, technology-based, curricular unit (SimCalc MathWorlds[R]) and to show how mathematics identities are enacted at…

Bullying has been around for decades; however, with the advancements of new emerging technology and devices, the ability for bullying to transcend into the cyber-world is becoming an international issue. Researchers have been intently studying the effects associated with cyberbullying to gain a better understanding of its perpetrators, victims,…

Educators face decisions when incorporating an expanding array of technological resources in mathematics education and interventions. Guided by Bandura's theory of self-efficacy, which holds that self-efficacy augments personal accomplishments, this quantitative study explored the relationship of Web 2.0 technology use and the development of…

This document presents the percentage of Texas students achieving the National Center for Educational Achievement's (NCEA) College and Career Readiness Targets and ACT's College Readiness Benchmarks. The key to all students graduating college and career ready is to be able to identify whether or not students, starting in elementary school, are on…

When in 2002 Maine launched its pioneering Maine Learning Technology Initiative (MLTI) that equipped every one of the state's 30,000 seventh- and eighth-grade public school students and teachers with their own Apple iBook, all eyes were on the endeavor. As the first statewide one-to-one deployment, MLTI's $37 million education experiment…

We describe findings from a series of longitudinal studies utilizing a response to intervention framework implemented over 3 years with students in Grades 6 through 8 with reading disabilities and poor reading comprehension. Students were identified based on reading comprehension scores in Grade 5 (n = 1,083) and then randomized to treatment or…

Throughout the history of education, it has been noted that teachers are influential people in lives of children (Applegate & Applegate, 2004; Daisey, 2010; Gambrell, 1996; Ruddell, 1995). Children spend one-third (or more) of the day with teachers; and as they enter into adolescence, children come in contact with more and more teachers during…

After accepting the principal position at Farmersville (TX) Junior High, the author decided to increase instructional rigor through question mapping because of the success he saw using this instructional practice at his prior campus. Teachers are the number one influence on student achievement (Marzano, 2003), so question mapping provides a…

We analyze how three seventh grade mathematics teachers from a majority Latino/a, linguistically diverse region of Texas taught the same lesson on interpreting graphs of motion as part of the Scaling Up SimCalc study (Roschelle et al., 2010). The students of two of the teachers made strong learning gains as measured by a curriculum-aligned…

In 2010, the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills (TAKS) began its seventh year of testing (Texas Education Agency, 2009a). High stakes testing is a reality. This study considered the impact on mathematics achievement based on the mathematics program students were receiving during their middle school years. The purpose of this study was to…

Spurred by a succession of reports pointing to the importance of algebra as a gateway to college, educators and policymakers embraced "algebra for all" policies in the 1990s and began working to ensure that students take the subject by 9th grade or earlier. A trickle of studies suggests that in practice, though, getting all students past…

The purpose of this study was to determine if there is a statistically significant mean difference in math and reading student performance by types of schools. The types of schools were identified as all-male and all-female public middle schools. Specifically, this study examined the impact of public single-sex schools on the mathematics and…

Collaborative Strategic Reading (CSR) is a multicomponent reading intervention aimed at improving students' text comprehension. Two 1-year randomized controlled trials were conducted to determine the efficacy of CSR with seventh and eighth grade students. The Year 2 replication study was identical to the original Year 1 study except that the…

This annual report provides information for the 2010-11 school year on grade-level retention and student performance in the Texas public school system. Student retention and promotion data are reported with data on the performance of students in Grades 3-10 on the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills (TAKS) reading and mathematics tests. [For…