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Volume 4 |
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Middle School Curriculum |
While the phrase "middle school" is often used to refer to an administrative structure, it also refers to the particular age group of students that middle school serves---10 to 14 year olds. What are the unique characteristics of these learners?
Physically, middle school students are developing at a rate faster than at any time in their lives except infancy. This rapid growth may bring with it clumsiness and poor coordination. Often the young compound their anxiety; growth rates among classmates might differ by several years, leading some children to wonder if they will ever catch up with their rapidly maturing classmates. Early adolescents tend, therefore, at times, to be very self-conscious and may become "behavior problems."
Socially, middle school children seek to establish their own identity and their own self-concept. As they seek to "fit in," their peers become an increasingly important influences on their lives. Along with this newly established identity is the need to make their own decisions. Often, middle school students are reluctant to act in accordance with the demands of their parents or those of other adults. While this stage of development may bring a certain anxiety to parents and teachers, it is an indication that the early adolescent is developing a greater capacity to conceive of alternative approaches to solving personal problems.
Middle school classrooms contain a fascinating array of cognitive abilities. Barbel Inhelder and Jean Piaget provide one model that attempts to describe the intellectual development of the young. They suggest that individuals progress through four states of intellectual development: sensori-motor (ages birth to 2 years), preoperational (ages 2 to 7), concrete operational (ages 7 to 11), and formal operational (ages 11 to 14). In brief, Inhelder and Piaget propose that, at different stages of cognitive development, people have a repertoire of patterns of reasoning---which individuals may apply to solving problems. The "concrete operational" student will be able to carry out logical thought process using concrete objects, while the "formal operational" student will be able to engage in the manipulation of purely mental constructs. Several other differences also distinguish these two categories, such as the ability of "formal operational" students to use proportional and probabilistic logic patterns, to consider the influence of many variables simultaneously, and to examine many possible combinations of a group of objects. Inhelder and Piaget's conclusions about patterns of reasoning could have implications for the kind of cognitive demands that we place upon students in science classrooms.
Subsequent research, however, has questioned Piaget's formulations, particularly as applied to specific age groups. It has been suggested that an individual's ability to approach a problem may be as much a factor of experience as of his or her generalized cognitive development.
In any case, successful middle/junior high schoolteachers need to be aware of and sensitive to the physical, emotional, affective, and cognitive characteristics of their middle school students. Because of the heterogeneity of abilities and physical characteristics, and because of the rapid rate at which these early adolescents are developing, the identification of special ability is particularly difficult.