Research
The membership of the National Forum have raised questions and issues directly related to middle grades' research.
National Forum Research Committee
In June 2007, the Research Committee received support and approval from the National Forum Board to engage in a series of research activities as part of the National Forum's Research Agenda that would promote the work of the Forum by:
- strengthening our empirical knowledge base related to the Schools to Watch (STW) schools and states through the systematic collection of reliable data from current and applicant STW schools/states;
- developing an online database, with querying capabilities, containing these data;
- collecting data on the CSR grant schools and including that data in the database to help ensure that the Forum is contributing to its research responsibilities related to the work of the CSR schools through the Forum's US Department of Education grant;
- providing access to descriptive data about STW schools to enable Forum members and others to more readily describe and discuss this national program;
- allowing for periodic preparation and dissemination of research summaries and/or briefs related to the Forum's accumulated database to benefit the work of the Forum and its members;
- providing research updates on current issues to support the needs of Forum members for such information; and
- collaborating with other networks, particularly the American Educational Research Association's (AERA) Middle Level Education Research Special Interest Group (MLER-SIG), to engage in research related to key questions in middle grades education.
- Indicators of Middle School Implementation: How Do Kentucky's Schools to Watch Measure Up? This research article on Kentucky's Schools to Watch (STW) and how they are measuring up, written by Chris Cook,Shawn Faulkner, and Lenore Kinne from Northern Kentucky University, has been published in Research in Middle Level Education Online. In the article the authors report and analyze the findings of their research that looked at the perceived level of implementation of the middle level concepts in both schools designated as a Kentucky STW and non-designated ones. In the study the authors also compared the academic performance of the two groups. The research does show a slight difference in both the level of perceived implementation of middle school concepts and student achievement between schools designated a STW and the non-designated schools. The schools designated as a STW had a greater level of implementation and student achievement was higher. In their concluding remarks the authors make several significant recommendations. Read the complete article.
EdSource -"Gaining Ground in the Middle Study" http://www.edsource.org/middle-grades-study.html
EdSource- "Improving Middle Grades Math Performance" http://www.edsource.org/iss-mgg-middle-math.html
