Education Commons^™

Things Learned - Or Affirmed - As A Middle School Mom, Kate M. Cassada

School of Professional and Continuing Studies Faculty Publications

As a life-long middle school advocate, I have always known and valued my students as their teacher and school leader, but recently I became a middle school mom. As a parent, many of my beliefs about doing what is right for middle school children have been affirmed, and I have gained wisdom by seeing the situation from a parent's perspectives. Here are some of the lessons learned or affirmed by a middle school mom.

Linguistic Cohesion In Middle-School Texts: A Comparison Of Logical Connectives Usage In Science And Social Studies Textbooks, Diego Román, Allison Briceño, Hannah Rhode, Stephanie Hironka

Faculty Publications

Learning from textbooks is challenging because students must understand novel concepts while also comprehending the language used to convey those concepts. In the domain of science, one posited reason for the perceived difficulty in the reading comprehension of science texts is the low frequency of logical connectives (words that signal relationships between sentences and ideas). To test this claim and discuss its potential effects on the reading comprehension of texts used at the middle school level, this study measured whether the usage of logical connectives (e.g., therefore, so) differed between science and social studies textbooks. Our findings from a large …

Understanding Teacher Morale, Jesse Senechal, Tamara Sober, Samantha Hope, Teri Johnson, Felicia Burkhalter, Teri Castelow, Debbie Gilfillan, Kenya Jackson, Autumn Nabors, Patrick Neuman, Rodney Robinson, Rob Sargeant, Stacy Stanford, Deanna Varljen

MERC Publications

This study emerged from discussions within the Policy and Planning Council of the Metropolitan Educational Research Consortium (MERC), a research alliance between Virginia Commonwealth University’s School of Education and seven surrounding school divisions.

The project has two goals. The first goal is to develop an understanding of the factors that impact teachers’ experience of their work in the current PK12 public school context. Although this topic could be, and has been, investigated through a number of lenses (e.g., burnout, trust, motivation), this project focuses on the idea of teacher morale, a choice that will be discussed in detail in the …