Middle Grades

Building on the work of EDC’s Addressing Accessibility in Middle School Mathematics, this project designs and implements a professional development model and materials that enable mathematics and special education teachers to successfully support students with disabilities in regular mathematics classrooms. The model includes workshops, example lesson adaptations, and school-based study groups. Project staff work with schools that use standards-based middle school mathematics curricula.

This project designed a professional development model and materials that enabled teachers to successfully support students with disabilities in regular mathematics classrooms. The model included workshops, example lesson adaptations, and school-based planning groups. Project staff worked with schools in the greater Boston area that used standards-based middle school mathematics curricula, such as MathScape and Connected Mathematics.

Young people in grades five through eight face increasing literacy needs and heightened pressures to engage in high-risk behaviors. Read for Health was a curriculum development and dissemination effort that integrated adolescent literacy with healthy development skills. Project staff created student materials and a facilitator’s guide for use in classroom and community settings, an interactive student game for use in the classroom and at home, and a video for parents and teachers to help them facilitate discussions of sensitive issues with early adolescents.

The project will create instructional materials, for use in seminar settings with teams of school and district leaders from middle and high schools, to support school and district leaders who are experiencing increasing pressure to improve the mathematics performance of students in their schools–at a time of raised expectations for all students’ enrollment in algebra and more participation in higher-level mathematics courses in high school.

EDC provides training in online facilitation and course design for a leadership group in the Columbus Public School District, and prepares the group to establish an online professional development program based on EDC’s EdTech Leaders Online model. The project is developing online, Web-based, interactive activities for middle school math students and is preparing teachers to incorporate these activities into their classrooms.

This project is producing, piloting, and disseminating the Seeing the Connections curriculum modules. The curriculum helps preservice teachers develop important mathematical knowledge and skills required in their future careers—designing effective lessons, emphasizing certain ideas over others, connecting ideas across the grades, understanding germs of insight in students’ questions, and placing topics in the precollege curriculum in the broader mathematical landscape.

The purpose of this study is to gather data about struggling readers with learning disabilities from mid-sized urban school districts in Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire. The project answers the following questions: (1) What diagnostic assessments are administered to students with identified learning disabilities who are struggling readers (e.g., fall below the Basic level on standardized tests) to determine their strengths and needs with respect to foundation skills (e.g., phonemic awareness, knowledge of high frequency sight words, and decoding ability)?