Toward Disciplinary Literacy: Dilemmas and Challenges in Designing History Curriculum to Support Middle School Students

In this article, Leslie Duhaylongsod, Catherine E. Snow, Robert L. Selman, and M. Suzanne Donovan describe the principles behind the design of curricular units that offer disciplinary literacy support in the subject of history for middle school students who represent a wide range of reading levels, and for their teachers, whose own subject matter expertise in history varies. The authors elucidate the theory of change from which the design principles derive and reveal dilemmas they faced in enacting disciplinary literacy when adhering to these principles. They use transcripts from classrooms implementing the curriculum to show instances of students demonstrating key skills approximating those used by historians, despite some compromises with authentic historical scholarship in the curriculum itself. By offering high-interest materials, opportunities to connect history to student experiences, and active classroom discussions and debates over historical controversies, the Social Studies Generation (SoGen) history curriculum, a part of the multidisciplinary Word Generation program, is an attempt to reconcile the tension between maintaining high student engagement with history and inducting students into the complex work of real historians.

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“Know Your Roots”: Development and Evaluation of an Oral History Curriculum for Native American Middle-School Students

American Indian Culture and Research Journal ◽

10.17953/aicr.29.4.322001805wl42628 ◽

2005 ◽

Vol 29 (4) ◽

pp. 59-74 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Jeanne Lacourt ◽

Darlene St. Clair ◽

Patricia K. Kokotailo ◽

Dale Wilson ◽

Betty Chewning

Keyword(s):

Middle School ◽

Native American ◽

Middle School Students ◽

Oral History ◽

School Students ◽

History Curriculum

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“I Know How to Read and All, but . . .”: Disciplinary Reading Constructions of Middle School Students of Color

Journal of Literacy Research ◽

10.1177/1086296x20938780 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 52 (3) ◽

pp. 316-340

Author(s):

Sabina R. Neugebauer ◽

Elizabeth E. Blair

Keyword(s):

Middle School ◽

Middle School Students ◽

Students Of Color ◽

Ways Of Knowing ◽

Subject Area ◽

Disciplinary Literacy ◽

School Students ◽

Literacy Experiences ◽

Subject Positions ◽

Literacy Perspectives

This study explores the disciplinary literacy perspectives of middle school students of color attending urban parochial schools and the reader subject positions they took up across content-area classrooms. Qualitative analysis of 19 student interviews and accompanying observations of subject-area classes revealed that students’ constructions of reading, circumscribed by classroom literacy activities, inhibited discipline-specific reading subject positions. In particular, this study highlights how teachers’ reading activities promoted reading as being about accomplishing a task rather than being apprenticed in ways of taking discipline-specific knowledge from text. When the boundaries between students’ home literacy experiences and school disciplinary literacy experiences were more contiguous, and when more meaningful, authentic literacy experiences were provided, students evidenced deeper disciplinary literacy engagement. Educational implications, including troubling disciplinary knowledge to open the disciplines to wider ways of knowing and learning for all learners, are discussed.

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P01-367-Evaluation of test anxiety in middle school students in one area of education of sanandaj city of kurdistan province of Iran, 2009

European Psychiatry ◽

10.1016/s0924-9338(11)72078-8 ◽

2011 ◽

Vol 26 (S2) ◽

pp. 369-369

Author(s):

F. Zaheri ◽

H. Zaheri ◽

L. Hashemi Nasab ◽

F. Ranaie

Keyword(s):

Middle School ◽

Middle School Students ◽

Test Anxiety ◽

Close Relation ◽

High Rate ◽

Physical And Mental Health ◽

School Students ◽

Special Schools ◽

Wide Range ◽

As Stress

Child and adolescences experience a wide range of anxiety during their growth that some of them result in academic and daily difficulties. Test Anxiety as one of these anxieties, is common and important phenomenon in education and have a close relation with educational and academic achievement.Because of importance of physical and mental health of these groups, this study was performed.MethodsThis descriptive study was performed with 1321 students selected from six middle schools (through random cluster) from schools in one area education of Sanandaj. For data Collection, Sarason test anxiety and demographic characters questionnaire was used.Sampling was done before end year examinationResultsIn this study, 51/9% of subjects were girls and 48/1% were boy. 29/7% of units were in first degree; 28/2% second and 42/1% in third year degree. Also, 35/4% of boys and 37/8% of girls were 14 years old. Severity of test anxiety in 20/2% was mild, 44/9% moderate and 34/9% was severe. In this research, we found statistical differences between severity of test anxiety and gender (p = /.001).DiscussionThe results showed high rate of test anxiety in middle school students. In our opinion, addition to gender effect on test anxiety levels, other factors such as stress of transition from one level to another level and access in special schools have significant role. Therefore, school coaches should attention to pathology and therapeutic methods for reducing test anxiety such as relaxation, systematic desensitization, immunization against stress and skills of reading correction in these groups.

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Engaging Middle School Students in Disciplinary Literacy Through Culturally Relevant Historical Inquiry

Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy ◽

10.1002/jaal.940 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Linda Kucan ◽

Emily Rainey ◽

Byeong‐Young Cho

Keyword(s):

Middle School ◽

Middle School Students ◽

Culturally Relevant ◽

Disciplinary Literacy ◽

Historical Inquiry ◽

School Students

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Gaining Insight into Students' Thinking through Assessment Tasks

Mathematics Teaching in the Middle School ◽

10.5951/mtms.6.2.0136 ◽

2000 ◽

Vol 6 (2) ◽

pp. 136-144

Author(s):

Despina A. Stylianou ◽

Patricia Ann Kenney ◽

Edward A. Silver ◽

Cengiz Alacaci

Keyword(s):

Middle School ◽

Middle School Students ◽

School Students ◽

Solution Strategies ◽

Assessment Tasks ◽

Wide Range ◽

Insight Into ◽

Gaining Insight

The task in Figure 1A, which was given to middle school students, asked them to find the number of dots in the twentieth step of the pattern. As shown in figure 1b, the answers that students gave ranged from 20 dots to well over 60 million dots. If your students gave these answers without providing work or explanations, would you be able to tell how they obtained them? Probably not. Without looking closely at the students' work or explanations or talking to them about their solution strategies, it is difficult to understand how they were thinking about the pattern task and how their thinking could have produced such a wide range of answers.

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