Middle School Grades 6-8

Improving the Middle Grades: Actions That Can Be Taken Now

The following six steps are recommended by "Making Middle Schools Work" to strengthen middle grades education. Although they are general, they apply to mathematics achievement as well.

• Get the mission right. Set out to prepare students for challenging work in high school.
• Define what students need to know and be able to do to be ready for high school.
• Set high but reasonable standards for student performance.
• Provide lagging students with extra time and extra help.
• Get more good principals, in part by changing the focus of existing programs for preparing principals.
• Get more good teachers, in part by changing licensure rules to require all middle grades teachers to have a solid grounding in the subjects they will teach.

(Source: http://www.sreb.org/programs/MiddleGrades/publications/publicationsindex.asp)

Middle-grades students are drawn toward mathematics if they find both challenge and support in the mathematics classroom.

• Adolescent students experience physical, emotional, and intellectual changes.
• There are differences in the intellectual development and emotional maturity of middle grade students.
• Typically, middle graders are very sensitive to peer-group perceptions.
• Teachers must create classroom environments with clearly established norms that support the learning of mathematics by everyone.

(Source: http://standards.nctm.org/document/chapter6/index.htm)