A comparison of middle school and junior high school achievement and attitudes

major problem of this study was to determine if there were any significant differences in achievement on the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills (ITBS) in the areas of reading skills, language skills, work-study skills, or mathematics skills among seventh grade students who attended North Junior High School in Great Falls, Montana. This school made a transition over a three-year period from a departmentalized junior high school to a middle school. The secondary problem of this study was to determine if there were significant differences in junior high and middle school students ' attitudes towards school as measured by the Minnesota School Attitude Survey (MSAS). The third problem of this study was to determine if there were any differences in the teachers ' and principal’s perceptions of the openness or closedness of the school climate in junior high and middle school by comparing responses on the Pupil Control Ideology (PCI) Form and the Rutgers Secondary School Climate Inventory-Final Form (RSSCI-FF) administered in 1986 and 1990. Twenty-two hypotheses were used to test the data for the first and secondary problems of this study. Visual examination of means and posted scores on scattergrams were used to analyze the data for the third problem. Findings indicated that: there were few significant differences in student achievement or attitude