Browsing by Subject "Middle school students"
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Item Interpersonal contact and intergroup relations: the impact of interracial friendship and group identity on intergroup relationships among middle school students(2003) Wilson, Kimberly Dawn; Carlson, Cindy I.Item Student perception of the effectiveness of SmartMusic as a practice and assessment tool on middle school and high school band students(2012-05) Gurley, Rodney; Dye, Keith; Killian, Janice; Martens, PeterAs new technology is developed more opportunities to enrich the music education classroom exist. The purpose of this study was to examine the effectiveness of the SmartMusic practice and assessment software with middle school and high school band students and to compare and analyze their perceptions of the effectiveness of the program. Participants of this study were band students (N = 147) in grades 6 through 12 in a small West Texas public school. Data in this study were gathered by asking all participants to complete a survey consisting of eleven separate prompts. The survey prompts were answered using a 5-point Likert scale and were designed to solicit the students’ perceptions of the effectiveness of the SmartMusic program. Somewhat in agreement with earlier investigations, the results indicated that the SmartMusic program did increase motivation to practice in younger students. Importantly, findings in this study showed a significant increase in student self-assessment with all groups of student participants regardless of age or experience level.Item Students as choice makers : integrating the visual arts with student issues(2007-05) Fowles, Courtney Susannah, 1973-; Bolin, Paul Erik, 1954-This study examined how seventh-grade and eight-grade Art I students could make integrated connections between the visual arts and a topic of personal significance to them. Additionally, the study focused on how integrating art and a personally selected topic affects students' understandings and attitudes toward the topic and the visual arts. Students first wrote about and researched a personally relevant topic, then made connections between their topics and the visual arts, and finally created an artwork based on their interdisciplinary investigations. The findings of this study support the ideas presented by prominent researchers and art educators who claim that students become more engaged in their learning when they actively construct knowledge derived from real-world problems.Item Teaching fractions to middle-school students struggling in mathematics : an exploratory study(2011-05) Misquitta, Radhika Maria Peter; Rieth, Herbert J.; Garcia, Shernaz B.; Bryant, Diane P.; Dodd, Barbara G.; O'Reilly, Mark F.Fractions are an essential skill for students to master, and one students struggling in mathematics face particular difficulty with (National Mathematics Advisory Panel, 2008; Mazzocco & Devlin, 2008). This study employed the multi-probe multiple baseline design to examine the effectiveness of the concrete-representational-abstract (CRA) approach and explicit teaching practices to teach fraction equivalence to students struggling in mathematics. The study was conducted across four students, and replicated simultaneously across four more. The CRA approach included concrete aids such as fraction circles and fraction strips, representations such as pictures of fraction circles and polygons, and algorithms. Explicit teaching involved following a model-lead-test sequence and included an advanced organizer, corrective feedback and cumulative reviews. Results of this study indicated that the intervention program was effective to improve students‟ performances in fraction equivalence tasks. In particular, the use of vii representations was seen to impact performance and concrete aids alone may not be sufficient to improve performance. With regards types of representational and concrete aids employed, results of this study tended to favor the use of linear versus circular aids. Results indicated that students whose performances tend to vary may not benefit to the same extent as those who have stable profiles. Students who demonstrate variable profiles may require additional practice to master skills being taught. This study also examined transfer of skills to word problems and, results demonstrated that the CRA and explicit teaching approaches were beneficial in helping aiding transfer. Several aspects of the program may have contributed to aiding transfer including, minimal exposure to word problems during intervention, drawing connections between representations and abstract information, and incorporating the fair sharing understanding or quotient interpretation of fractions. This program concluded that students were able to maintain performances over time, and that representations in particular appeared to aid conceptual understanding and promote maintenance of skills.