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The purpose of this study was to analyze the effects of the Internet as a research tool on elementary students' quality of writing, their perceptions of effort expended, and their resource media preference in writing an expository paper. We gathered data from 56 upper-elementary students as they wrote expository papers using print resources, electronic resources via the Internet, or both types of resources. We noted no significant differences among the quality of writing that could be attributed to the resources used or grade in school. However, students liked using the Internet more than traditional print resources for doing research. In addition, fifth-grade students perceived that they put forth more effort when using the Internet for this writing task. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Coal mining has a deep history in the Appalachian region, where some local economies have heavily relied on coal production. While coal employment in the region has generally been in a long-term decline, there is variation across counties, with coal employment still representing a large share of total employment for some counties. This paper explores how coal activity—measured by coal employment, coal employment as a share of total employment, coal production, and the number of coal mines—impacts locally provided funding for K-12 education. Using county-level data that spans from 1995 to 2016, results indicate that increases in coal activity have a positive and significant impact on local revenues per student though effects are modest. The findings are robust across different specifications. The implication is that declines in coal activity can hamper school funding, in turn affecting adequate investments in education that are essential for economic development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The main goals of Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA) are to achieve primary education for all school children aged 6–14; reduce gender, regional and social spaces, and complete 100% retention of school children. Although, some obstacles and lacunas are pointed out here and there. Therefore, this paper attempted to analyze infrastructure facilities, academic facilities, community participation, and co-curricular activities from the stakeholders in the primary schools of Mahaboobnagar, Nalgonda, and Ranga Reddy under the Jurisdiction of Telangana state. The survey found that 70% of Heads of Institutions agree with SSA plans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examined the effect of the Unplugged Programming Teaching Aids (UPTA) on students' computational thinking and classroom interaction. A set of UPTA was created and used in a primary school in southern China. A total of 48 students aged 6–8 were assigned to two classes, with the same instructor and learning materials, but only the treatment group was provided with the UPTA. Both groups were tested on computational thinking ability, children's concrete operation status, degree of ego-centricity, and in-classroom interaction. Results indicated that the children aged 6–8 years old could classify things according to two kinds of criteria at the same time, but their cognitive style was still ego-centered and they found it difficult to deal with problems from a third-party perspective, no matter whether in the treatment group or the control group. However, students in the treatment group achieved significantly higher scores on the test of computational thinking and were more engaged in the classroom interaction patterns. These findings provide evidence of the positive effect of the UPTA on promoting children's computational thinking by guiding them to decompose and solve problems, as well as enhancing their interaction and communication in the classroom, so as to transform from simple imitation to collaborative inquiry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Students have their first contact with the subject of history in elementary education. At this point, they have still not developed the reading strategies that this type of domain requires. At elementary level, teachers must support their students to contextualize information and make explicit the relationships among ideas as a basic aspect of historical reasoning in the classroom. This paper explores the ways in which teachers with specific experience in teaching history in elementary education support their students to access the contents and relationships in history textbooks. Results show how teachers often contextualized and shared the ideas and the relationships among those ideas needed to understand the text. However, once the help provided to their students has been analysed in relation to the perceived level of complexity, the data reveal that teachers focused on the less complex ideas and relationships, rather than on the more complex ones. This seemingly paradoxical strategy could be explained by the discrepancy between the intrinsic complexity of texts and the learners' historical background knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides an update on our earlier paper on the introduction by the Kenyan government in 2003 of free primary education (FPE), and its impact on low-fee private schools. First, published papers that have used our contribution as a springboard for discussion are critically reviewed. The argument and supporting evidence that the poor are not making preferred choices for low-fee private schools, but are in fact ‘crowded out’ of government schools, are explored. It is suggested that this argument depends upon the assumption of poor quality in the low-fee private schools – lower quality than is found in government schools. This assumption is found not to be tenable, on the basis of evidence given, especially concerning pupil–teacher ratios (PTRs) and other input indicators. Second, an update is given on the data collected in 2003. Longitudinal evidence gathered in 2007, 4 years after our original data were collected, points to a dramatic increase in the number of private schools serving the slum of Kibera, Nairobi. In total 116 private schools now operate in the slum, with private school enrolment showing an increase of 130 per cent. On the important indicator of PTRs, these have increased by nearly 50 per cent in the government schools, giving an average of 88:1, compared to 28:1 in the low-fee private schools. The longitudinal findings and critical literature review are combined to suggest that low-fee private schools should be seen as partners in education for all; various ways in which international organisations are responding to the challenge of improving quality in, and extending access to, low-fee private schools are reviewed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

High quality and culturally responsive early childhood education and care (ECEC) for young children before kindergarten is seen as a way to ensure that all children enter school ready to learn. ECEC is even more crucial in the context of recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic and the disproportionate burden of trauma and stress borne by families of color in disinvested neighborhoods. Remote learning and repeated disruptions to in-person instruction as protocols shifted during waves of the pandemic placed an extra strain on families, and may have increased educational disparities in the U.S. Taken together, these challenges have implications for children's school readiness due to their impact on opportunities for learning at home and in the classroom. This paper explores how ECEC programs can be strengthened to better meet children's needs, and ways in which future research can shed light on these important issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focuses on the significance of an art program for the education of gifted students at Sommerset Elementary School. Benefits from art; Case of Kinsley Jackson, a fifth-grade at-risk student; Kinsley's response to each assignment in the art program; Effects of the program on a student's life. INSET: Art room supply list..

This paper is framed as an email conversation between the authors, a lifespan developmental psychologist with expertise in the field of wisdom and an educational scientist with expertise in the field of giftedness. We discuss how giftedness is defined and whether the definition, and the concept in general, is still useful in today's world. We draw three conclusions. First, "giftedness" has taken on a particularly literal meaning as it tends to favor students that are already privileged. Second, educational systems should aim to identify and promote all students' individual profiles of strengths and interests instead of focusing on promoting the "gifted" ones. Third, given the current state of the world, educational systems should aim to empower "gifting" students who engage themselves for a greater good, instead of "gifted" students competing for grades and achievements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this introduction to the Special Issue Early algebraic thinking: studies from different perspectives, approaches and regions we provide readers with the main motivation and interest underlying research on early algebraic thinking. We then introduce the five papers that make up this Special Issue. Each of these studies, coming from various countries around the world, has a different theoretical framework, methodological approach and perspective regarding teachers, students, instructional practices and curricula. In this introduction, we summarize some of the main themes throughout the different papers, including interviewers' practices that can promote early algebraic thinking; the kinds of practices that teachers can implement to have a positive impact on students' early algebraic thinking; and the use of physical models to explore and promote aspects of early algebraic thinking. The Special Issue also includes an additional Prospectives piece by Analúcia Schliemann and David Carraher, in which they examine the algebraic thinking research in elementary school in light of the current mathematics standards in the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multiple deprivation affects a large proportion of schools in South Africa. The past 20 years of democracy have tended to focus on reforming education through curricula revision and a raft of redress-directed interventions, through the application of what we call a broad-brush policy approach. The paper argues that a broad-brush policy application fails to recognise the contextualised challenges faced in specific schools. The central purpose of the research was to discover the specific challenges and leadership issues that schools in multiple deprived communities face, and to identify ways in which such schools dealt with these challenges. The research was conducted through a case study approach of three schools in one of the most impoverished provinces of the country. In total 3 principals, 3 parents and 26 teachers were interviewed. The study found that while the three schools shared many similar conditions of poverty that drove the poor to marginal performance, stories of success tended to be strongly related to four key factors: (1) leadership that went beyond an ordinary focus on instruction; (2) staff stability; (3) flexible scheduling that allowed parental involvement; and (4) a focus on a school-wide project that acted as a rallying point and a source of pride for the entire school. The paper identifies asset-based leadership and servant leadership approaches as generative in schools facing multiple deprivation. The paper concludes with a call for more school-based improvement initiatives that seek to interrogate the impact of factors of multiple deprivation, and a broad policy redirection towards school improvement rather than educational reform, which has been the focus in the past 20 years. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper describes some elements of a specific kind of design-based research, cooperative engineering. In the first part of the paper, we argue that cooperative engineering can be analyzed through a joint action framework. We first present some conceptual tools that the Joint Action Theory in Didactics proposes in order to understand didactic and cooperative action. The second part of the paper is devoted to cooperative engineering, a research process that gathers teachers and researchers through a common project. We first give some root principles of this kind of research endeavor. Then we focus on a specific cooperative engineering, Arithmetic and Comprehension at Elementary School, which aims towards building a mathematics curriculum at first and second grades. After a general description of the research project, we analyze one of its core components, the engineering dialogue. We show how this joint action between teachers, researchers, and teachers and researchers, enables the cooperative engineering team to build and rebuild the curriculum in an iterative way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the gap between policies and practices of integration of migrant children in Slovenian schools while rejecting the perception of integration as merely passive assimilation or simple one-way adaptation to the new social reality. The paper draws on secondary sources, interviews, and focus groups with members of the educational community as well as with (migrant) children. The lack of a holistic, standardized, systematic and long-term approach to the integration of migrant children in education in Slovenia leads to inconsistent and different ways schools and individual educational staff approach the integration process. We argue for the need for systemic changes to reduce the current gap between non-binding policies addressing the issue of integration of migrant children in education and practices in schools. Implementing the principle of intercultural education at all levels would contribute towards better intercultural awareness, competencies and skills, not only for teachers and educators but for everyone — children, youths and adults, who are all part of culturally diverse societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent observers of the current state of teacher education concur that teacher preparation programs are beset by dilemmas which challenge reassessment and change (Gideonse, 1982; Katz & Raths, 1982; Watts, 1982a, 1982b, 1982c, 1982d). Each writer documents the problems posed to institutions and offers solutions for resolving them. The solutions range from the dream of reconstructing traditional programs to a more practical revision by basing focus and content on empirical findings. Each is responsive to three documented realities of higher education today: that enrollments are declining, that resources consequently are diminishing, and that the most academically able are not choosing teaching (Vance & Schlechty, 1982). Some teacher training institutions, in an effort to counter these realities, are restructuring their education offerings by developing programs to attract clientele who service populations other than elementary and secondary schools. Such marketing may become the norm for teacher training institutions to survive the realities of the 1980s, but survival is also dependent on quality programs which graduate exemplary teachers. The intent of this paper is to describe an alternative way to strive for quality in lieu of(or while we are conducting) major face-lifts. The proposal is for teacher preparation programs to adopt a theoretical or philosophical model common to all its programs and departments. Such a framework will have operational goals and objectives which will not only be acknowledged by education faculty, but will guide program implementation. This suggestion is not unfamiliar. We all learned the import of adopting a theoretical framework when we learned how to inquire. However, this foundational concept has eluded teacher educators during discussions of program review and change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the assessment of student writing competence. Large-scale assessments may track writing development at two levels: (a) a minimum level used in proficiency testing to identify students who do not yet use the most basic skills of clear writing, and (b) a more advanced level used in status testing to describe the broader range of writing skill development sought by secondary schools. Many assessment programs do not present a clear rationale for the discourse aims they test and for how these aims relate to those required in curriculum guides or in classroom assignments. Elementary level writing assessments have used expressive writing to assess beginning fluency and mechanical development or narrative writing to assess the development of more structured, transactional writing. Studies of the writing assignment features that influence students' writing performance suggest that variations within the task's structure such as discourse aim, topic, time, and cues place different task demands on the writer and can produce conflicting evidence about an individual's writing skill.

This comparative case study explores how 18 state education agencies (SEAs) support school districts in advancing standards-based elementary science reform. We identify how SEAs understand their work in advancing elementary science reform and describe how SEAs sought to engage districts in bridging from standards to classroom practice. Based on our analysis, we argue that the school subject is a critical explanatory variable in understanding SEA efforts to support standards implementation and SEAs lean on a resource-based approach for instructional policy implementation. This study contributes to the growing research base on the role of state policy in supporting standards implementation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Teachers are the key to the success of the learning process, so teacher perceptions are fundamental in supporting educational goals. This study aims to evaluate the impact of teachers' personal and professional resources in elementary education on school-based human resource management. This research method is a cross-sectional study involving 474 elementary school teachers in Magetan Regency, East Java, Indonesia. The collected data was structured by PLS Structural Equation Modeling and analyzed by SmartPLS version 3.0 application. The study results found that all aspects of teachers' personal resources (years of service, teachers' online learning perception, and positive mental health) affect school-based management. Meanwhile, aspects of teacher certification status and literacy learning implementation affect school-based human resource management for teachers' professional resources. Interestingly, the status of teachers, whether public or contracted, does not affect school-based management. This study benefits the government in formulating education policies, especially in implementing the teacher certification program and improving the competence of teachers and school principals. Further research is needed on strategies to improve the quality of school-based management especially in human resource. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Schools in Abu Dhabi are going through transformation and reform. The New School Model (2010) introduced changes to the curriculum and teaching and learning methodologies. In line with these changes, recently introduced ‘Principal Professional Standards’ and ‘Performance Evaluation’ documents have conceptualized new roles and responsibilities allocated to principals. To enhance the capacity of principals to lead and implement change, the Abu Dhabi Education Council (ADEC) has provided professional development. Within the context of professional development received and in lieu of school changes and reform, this paper focuses on roles and responsibilities of principals and challenges faced as far as implementing them. Semi-structured interviews with 16 principals formed the main source of data collection and analysis. The findings presented examine anticipated roles and responsibilities and challenges faced implementing them as contextualized within the framework of the professional standards and performance evaluation documents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper theorises the field of symbolic control and reflects on the critical literature of policy studies, exploring the possibilities that the former might offer to the analysis of global policy discourses and their up-take in specific national and local contexts. Starting from the rapidly expanding literature on the ‘globalising’ and ‘globalised’ projects that ‘modern’ nation states have been implementing to ‘manage change’, the paper argues that theories on governance can be developed considerably – theoretically and in terms of their capacity to guide empirical research – through their exposure to Bernstein’s sociological theory of symbolic control and Totally Pedagogised Society. Drawing data from an empirical study carried out in Greece, it explores changes in the field of educational administration towards the systematic implementation of ideas and practices of new public management, evident in processes of the selection, training and professional practice of middle level administrative staff. Semi-structured interviews with the new Heads of Primary and Secondary Educational Directorates were focused on how they perceive their position, roles and activity as important agents within the field of symbolic control, through which global policy discourses are enacted within the national education system, instituting new forms of practice at local levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Everyday cultural resources that originate outside school offer possibilities for multimodal creativity and identity play, as children consume, transform and produce multimodal texts. In this study, Kyle, a boy in elementary school, fluidly performed social identities and engaged in playful and parodic rescripting of identities and resources from everyday culture, such as professional wrestling and rap music. In this paper, I posit that (1) Kyle and his family understood and experienced professional wrestling in contradictory ways as both taboo and appealing, (2) Kyle’s deep knowledge of the genre of professional wrestling as performative text allowed him to use it in playful and parodic ways, (3) this playful approach to wrestling and other masculine identities, made available through Kyle’s culture, constitutes a form of improvisation and can be explained as a form of masculine melodrama and (4) the role of audiences is key in the reflexive performance of masculine identities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Literature examining effective leadership in education describe a number of models such as Transformational, Learner-Centred, Distributed and Situational. A similar example is ‘pedagogical leadership’, a phrase that frequently appears in literature and one referring to forms of practice that shape and form teaching and learning to be integrated in leadership. In this paper, however, we will argue that the term pedagogy is an ambiguous one when it is attached to the concept of leadership and requires further explanation, particularly in the 21st century. Our conclusions are informed by findings from research undertaken by us with headteachers and leaders of early years settings in England during 2012. One of the key findings is that we should shift from using models of leadership and instead to view leadership as a praxis that is not merely concerned with the dichotomy of teaching, learning and outcomes, but is also concerned with an integrated conceptualisation of the relations between teaching, the learning ecology of the community and the social set of axes in which the educational organisation is set. This understanding of pedagogical leadership is thus concerned with the links between desired educational outcomes and the set of social realities that surround the educational setting. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Background. The latest Japanese National Curriculum emphasized the importance of active learning as well as communication skills in various subject areas. Following this trend, the social skills education (SSE) approach was adopted to promote and improve skills that facilitate interpersonal conflict resolution in elementary school students. Aim. This study developed a card game to help elementary school teachers perform SSE. The aims were to convince students to contemplate alternative solutions to problems in a way that incorporates suggestions from other students and to motivate children to think about problem solving in a social context. Methods. Our card game was developed based on Matsuda's warp and woof model of problem-solving that emphasizes generating ideas concerning trade-off resolution in problem-solving. We then tested the game in a sample of 74 fourth grade (9-10 years old) elementary school students. Results. The findings suggest that the students understood the importance of considering new alternatives for trade-off resolution by playing our game. Conclusions. Despite the limitations of our study, such as the small sample size, our findings demonstrated that the game was successful in teaching most students the necessity of reaching a consensus in situations involving conflicting opinions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports research that investigated parental support for children’s reading of English in an inner-city school in the developing country context of an Indian city, Ahmedabad. Children had oral proficiency in the regional language but were beginning to acquire conventional forms of literacy in English. Sociocultural mediation theory underpinned a mixed-methods research design. A quasi-experimental trial with a sample of 241 children was conducted to assess the relative effectiveness of two approaches to parents supporting reading: Paired Reading and Hearing Reading. Interviews and observations with a smaller sub-sample of parents and children were utilised to further explore the implications of the trial data. Paired Reading and Hearing Reading were found to be equally effective in enhancing children’s beginning English reading skills, reading accuracy and comprehension, relative to controls. Parents engaged in a variety of mediation behaviours to enhance their children’s English reading development. Parents felt that participating in their children’s reading was both enriching and empowering. In view of the evidence that Hearing Reading can be, and was, implemented by parents with little or no English language proficiency, it is concluded that implementing Hearing Reading on a wider scale across the city could impact beneficially on children’s English reading development. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Developing mathematical talent in our students should be of primary consideration in education today as nations respond to the challenges of economic crises and ever-changing technological advances. This paper describes two U.S. federally funded curriculum projects, Project M3, Mentoring Mathematical Minds, and Project M2, Mentoring Young Mathematicians for students ages 5 through 12. These projects foster in-depth understanding of advanced mathematical concepts by challenging and motivating students to solve and discuss high-level problems in a fashion similar to practicing mathematicians. The curricula have undergone national field tests with proven research results showing significant achievement gains for students studying the curricula over a comparison group of like-ability students. This paper outlines the philosophy behind each program and its connection to the literature and best practices in the fields of gifted education and mathematics education. Next, specific instructional strategies integral to both curricula are outlined. These strategies help teachers establish a community of learners that promotes rich discussions as a platform for posing and solving interesting problems, constructing viable arguments, and defending as well as critiquing solutions. Finally, strategies to help young student mathematicians develop clear and logical written justifications for their mathematical reasoning and share their creative insights are described. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fewer than 20 states require middle grades certification; in most states, credentials overlap so that both elementary and secondary certified teachers may teach in the middle grades. Moreover, in many urban districts, getting teachers for the middle grades is a challenge. Despite this crazy-quilt of certifications and a growing body of work on teacher qualifications, there have been few studies that examine the teachers' impact on learning in the middle grades. This paper uses a data set from an urban district to estimate the impact of different certifications (and lack of certification) on middle-grades students' learning gains in mathematics and science. In mathematics, we find that students with elementary- and secondary-certified teachers outscore those with uncertified teachers and those who are certified in special education. Especially strong effects are seen in science, where students with secondary science-certified teachers substantially outscore those with any other kind of teacher. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines Slovenian physical education (PE) teachers' (n = 85) estimations of their own actual and desired professional competencies with the aim of diagnosing the main needs of practising PE teachers and resolving them within a revised Slovenian Physical Education Teacher Education (PETE) curricula and through continued professional development programmes. Results show that PE teachers realistically acknowledge their own deficiencies within certain areas of practice, that during their training they are required to develop knowledge that is not directly applicable in PE classes, thus further detracting from the development of more relevant practically orientated knowledge, and that the reorganization of the Slovenian educational system during the last 15 years presented widespread demands that were not accompanied by appropriate professional institutional support. Their relative disinterest in the competencies developed through the subdisciplinary studies indicates that the mode and contents of the subdisciplinary subjects in the present PETE curriculum should be reviewed and refocused on the contents of the revised primary and secondary school curricula. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reintroducing computer science (CS) education in K–12 schools to promote computational thinking (CT) has attracted significant attention among scholars and educators. Among the several essential components included in CS and CT education, program debugging is an indispensable skill. However, debugging teaching has often been overlooked in K–12 contexts, and relevant empirical studies are lacking in the literature. Moreover, novices generally have poor performance in domain knowledge and strategic knowledge concerning debugging. They also consistently experience a high cognitive burden in debugging learning. To address these gaps, we developed a flipped systematic debugging approach combined with a systematic debugging process (SDP) and the modeling method. A quasi-experimental study was conducted to explore the effectiveness of this flipped systematic debugging approach, in which 83 fifth-grade students attended the flipped debugging training lessons with the SDP–modeling method, and 75 fifth-grade students attended the unassisted flipped debugging training lessons without the SDP–modeling method. The results indicated that flipped debugging training using the SDP–modeling method improved students' debugging skills. The results from the questionnaire showed that the proposed teaching approach increased the students' investment in germane cognitive load by promoting schema construction. It also helped reduce students' intrinsic and extraneous cognitive load in learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses gross errors of inaccuracy in the screening of kindergarten students to predict first-grade achievement. Failure to take individual differences of first-grade teachers into account; Examination of the extent to which first-grade teachersdiffer expectations of students and other measures; Method; Results.

The article provides information on how to create a community of mathematical discourse within elementary and secondary classrooms. This paper also presents a reply from the paradox that students who assert that a teacher provides better help than an artificially intelligent computer-based tutor nonetheless prefer using the tutor to learning in a more traditional manner and appear to learn more while doing so. Many designers of mathematics courseware would take exception to the idea that extrinsic rewards humanize the interactions. To inject an extrinsic reward would be to dehumanize the student, to reduce the student to some kind of academic wageslave, to take away an important degree of autonomy.

Recent teacher effectiveness research has received much attention. This research, conducted almost exclusively in elementary grades and in basic skills areas, can be summarized in two statements: 1. The most effective teachers of basic skills generate the greatest engaged time on task by using direct instruction and management techniques (Good, 1979; Rosenshine, 1979; Brophy, Note 1; Duffy, Note 2). 2. Such teachers look more like technicians than reflective professionals because of the way they use instructional materials to maintain the activity flow which insures maximum engaged time and minimum pupil disruptions (Duffy, in press; Brophy, Note 3; Joyce, Note 4: Shavelson, Note 5). These findings have substantiated the importance of Carroll's (1963) concept of ‘opportunity to learn.’ There is a danger, however, that we will conclude that all we need to do to improve basic skills instruction is to prepare technicians who maximize engaged time on task. Classroom teaching is much more than opportunity to learn. Carroll (1963) himself suggested that opportunity to learn is but one component of successful school learning. Another is quality of instruction. To date, research on teaching has shed little light on the latter. This paper argues for greater attention to this aspect of classroom teaching, both in research and in our teacher education efforts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a study which attempts to measure the curiosity of elementary school children. An investigation to find ways to measure the curiosity of elementary school children with paper-and-pencil instruments was carried out in three stages, involving three separate samples of fifth grade children. Children differing in level of curiosity were identified by teacher, peer, and self judgment. The influences of sex, popularity, and intelligence on these judgments were considered. Only intelligence was found to be significantly related to the judgments.

In addition to a brief report on benefits to handicapped children under Title 1 of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, this paper raises two major questions: (a) How will special education relate itself to new and diversified programs emerging in general education, such as Compensatory Education? and (b) Are substantial numbers of children not truly handicapped in capacity, but simply functioning as handicapped due to environmental deprivation? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Taking the school bus has long been an integral part of the school experience in the U.S. However, not much is known about how school transportation relates to getting to school each day, particularly for students with disabilities. This study used ECLS-K: 2011 to explore two issues. First, we examined what characteristics are associated with taking the school bus, comparing students with and without disabilities. Second, we evaluated the link between taking the school bus and absenteeism for these groups. In the first set of findings, school bus taking is differentiated by student and family characteristics, as well as by urbanicity. We find no major differences in characteristics associated with taking the bus between students with disabilities and students without. As for the second set of findings, students with more common disability diagnoses had fewer absences compared to both students without disabilities as well as those with lower incidence diagnoses, suggesting that taking the bus is related to better attendance behaviors for some students with disabilities. Implications are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dr. Michael J. Marlowe is emeritus professor of special education in the College of Education at Appalachian State University. An English graduate from the University of Kentucky, he has a PhD in special education from the University of Florida and a MS degree in elementary education from Indiana University. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This exploratory, qualitative study investigated the perceptions of Saudi Arabian parents of elementary school‐aged children with learning disabilities with regard to their involvement in their children's education. Guided by results of previous research conducted primarily with Western samples, and using a semistructured interview methodology followed by thematic phenomenological analyses, specific interview topics included parental perceptions of (a) the importance of parent–school partnerships, (b) the means of encouraging a parent–school relationship, and (c) how school practices may affect parental participation. The study involved 13 parents of children in elementary education (ages 7–12 years) diagnosed with learning disabilities. The results suggest several ways to overcome the involvement barriers reported by parents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fifteen years later, the topic of September 11, 2001 is slowly being woven into the U.S. curricular fabric. This paper presents an analysis of the ways current U.S. state curriculum standards treat 9/11 in elementary social studies, and a critical analysis of children's books about 9/11. Finally, the authors suggest children's books that can help treat the historical event of 9/11 in more critical and thought-provoking ways in elementary classrooms, despite the topic's scant representation in state standards. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Helping elementary students with learning disabilities (LD) prepare for the rigor of middle school writing is an instructional priority. Fortunately, several standards-based skills in upper elementary school and middle school overlap. Teachers in upper elementary grades, specifically fourth and fifth grades, have the opportunity to provide evidence-based writing instruction that will provide readiness for middle school writing. In this article, three key writing standards are highlighted and then paired with an evidence-based instructional approach for teaching genre-based (i.e., informative, persuasive, narrative) writing instruction, revising and editing, and note taking to students with LD. Teaching procedures and resources are included. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social studies scholars consider the role that schools, and in particular teachers, play in preparing young students to be active participatory citizens in a democracy. Yet, the research on teachers learning to be democratic teachers overwhelmingly focuses on the social studies methods course rather than field experiences. This study examines how teacher candidates experienced, conceptualized, and enacted democratic education while immersed in a semester-long elementary field experience in a democratic classroom. In particular, this paper focuses on two case studies which represent the most clear, as well as disparate, conceptions and enactments of democratic education; one engaged in a critical examination of society through curriculum, while the other focused on the inculcation of particular discussion and deliberation skills necessary to be an engaged democrat. While each classroom afforded the teacher candidates a thick conception of democratic education that drew on critical curriculum and pedagogy, as well as democratic skills, the teacher candidates' lived experiences and prior conceptions of democracy shaded their learning and created missed learning opportunities. Classrooms as sites of knowledge about democratic education provide robust learning opportunities for teacher candidates; however, like any transformative learning experience, those opportunities need mediation to realize their full potential. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reviewing the assessment literature, dynamic assessment is the most recently advocated type of assessment in that it not only argues for integration between assessment and instruction, but also takes into consideration the testees' past, present, and future potentials. However, as far as dynamic assessment is concerned, a key question is: How much assistance, or mediation, should be provided by the assessor? Most studies are at the level of theory, and putting the theory into practice is not that easy. The same question is more salient for gifted students. Should they be provided with the same degree of mediation as is provided for other students? The current paper makes an attempt to provide a more practical and understandable answer to this question. To achieve the goal, the authors refer to the concept of critical thinking and, after clarifying it, responds to the above-mentioned question by maintaining that helping gifted students reach the threshold level of critical thinking should be the final point of assisting learners in an assessment session. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Simulations provide a unique opportunity to practice newly acquired skills in a low risk environment. For this reason, simulations have historically been used in preservice teacher education programs to enable student teachers to apply generalized pedagogical practices. This pilot study examined how simulations could be integrated with inservice teachers as an assessment of content-specific instructional practices covered in a professional development program. The study utilized two nationally recognized simulation platforms and included a preliminary investigation of validity of the simulation assessments, a comparison of participant performance on the simulation assessment to the standard module assessment, and a comparison of the usability and feasibility of each platform for future assessments. While results suggest that simulation platforms are a promising means of conducting content-specific assessments, current limitations of such platforms may challenge their large-scale usage as part of a professional development program. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Massive and timely screening of the student population for early signs of reading difficulties is needed to implement timely effective remediation of these difficulties. However, traditional approaches are costly and hard to apply. Here, we present Lexiland, a tablet-based reading assessment tool for kindergarten and primary school children developed to be applied in school settings with minimal personnel intervention. Following a story line, players help a character of the game perform several tasks that measure different predictors of reading outcomes. Most of the tasks that usually involve a verbal response were switched to receptive tasks to demand a touch-screen response only. The tablet application was administered to a sample of N = 616 5-yo kindergarten children and to a sub-sample of these children twice during the following two years (First and Second Grades). Applying logistic regression and cross-validation, we selected a reduced subset of tasks that can predict with great sensitivity and specificity, whether a five-year-old child will have reading difficulties by the end of first grade (sensitivity 90% and specificity 76%) and two years later (sensitivity 90% and specificity 61%). Importantly, Lexiland is a scalable tool to implement universal screening, given the increasing availability of devices able to run android and iOS applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using a dataset that includes over 17 million students from across all 50 states, we estimate the causal impact of making structural transitions into middle school (in grades 4, 5, 6, or 7) on student math and reading achievement trajectories. This dataset provides an ideal opportunity to engage in the valuable scientific practice of conducting replication studies. Prior research on the impacts of middle school transitions is of high quality and rests on a strong causal warrant, but the study settings vary greatly and use data from a prior decade. We conduct a replication (i.e., using the same methods on different data) using larger, broader, and more recent data. We extend prior analyses in ways that may further strengthen the causal warrant. Finally, we explore heterogeneity of effects across subgroups and states, which may help reconcile differences in the magnitude of estimated effects across studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Language-oriented literacy standards offer mostly linguistic accounts of text complexity. In response, the present article demonstrates that multimodal and visual narratives offer additional ways to understand and discuss text complexity. This descriptive analysis of one fourth-grader's comic provides an account of the multimodal patterns and orchestration noted across the pages of the comic. Data sources included the published comic, as well as a multimodal artifact elicitation interview conducted with Sabrina, a fourth-grade student. The authors show how Sabrina constructed a complex multimodal text by drawing not only from her knowledge of image and written language but also from her experiences with spoken language, touch, facial expressions, and gesture. These findings suggest that it would be beneficial for teachers and researchers to continue to create curricular space for multimodal composing opportunities and that stakeholders in language arts and communication education might deepen collaborations to develop instructional frameworks that support students as they compose using modes beyond language across the grade levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of the paper is to contribute to the critical study of digital data use in education, through examination of the processes surrounding school inspection judgements. The interaction between pupil performance data and other (embodied, enacted) sources of inspection judgement is scrutinised and discussed with a focus on the interaction between people (in this case inspectors) and data in the forming of judgements. I look at the changing position, work and personnel of the Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted) in England, drawing on recent Economic and Social Research Council funded research, with an emphasis on changes in the basis of authority claims of personnel (who traditionally operated through elite social networks and knowledges) and the rise of data (especially in its new interactive forms) in order to illustrate how the demands and logics of data production and use influence the performance of authority in school inspections in England, and with some reference to wider developments in Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is desirable that children engage in reading and writing beyond school. What is known about various individual and environmental variables that may be related to children's leisure reading and writing? And how strong is existing evidence? Our scoping review aims at mapping research on leisure reading and writing in first- to fourth-graders. Using content analysis, we extracted 135 research findings, among them only 6 on leisure writing. In most findings, leisure reading and writing were considered as consequences of variables like reading competence, motivation, and attitudes. Considerably fewer findings included leisure reading and writing as antecedents. We discuss the need for more longitudinal and experimental studies and a stronger focus on the connection between leisure reading and writing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research and theory suggests that children and families are best served by a preschool to third grade approach (PreK−3) to early childhood education that is aligned, integrated, and based on developmentally appropriate practice. Because of the recent expansion of publicly funded preschool programs, principals are becoming increasingly responsible for overseeing these programs, and, as instructional leaders, play a critical role in establishing working conditions and creating organizational capacity to support teachers' professional growth. Unfortunately, however, early childhood education is rarely addressed in principal preparation programs and principals are often unfamiliar with the science of child development. Using a qualitative case study design, the current study describes how one school principal began to lead a PreK−3 community at her school by examining data collected across a two-year period as the principal led a professional learning community with preschool, transitional kindergarten, and kindergarten teachers. The PreK−3 Learning Communities Competencies for Effective Principals developed by the National Association of Elementary School Principals were used to identify the thoughts, behaviors, and actions of one principal as she engaged in this work. Results from this study further discourse in the field as to what this approach looks like in practice and call attention to the need for structural changes in preschool and elementary settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the variety and integration of linguistic resources used by third and seventh graders in elementary schools with different socio-educational characteristics in Northern Patagonia (Argentina), when composing a description about a familiar topic. Texts were analysed according to two steps: a category analysis was performed from a lexicogrammatical and morpho-orthographic approach (unit of analysis: the word), and then a correspondence analysis and a following ascendant hierarchical cluster analysis were applied. Five clusters revealed three stages of learning to write a descriptive text — initial literacy, confirmation, writing to learn — and five linguistic-discursive styles — enumerative, intimate, protagonist, historical-contextual, external observer. These patterns were interpreted in terms of different modes of appropriation and the use of writing, related to the specific characteristics of the written task and the particular socio-educational traits of each grade/school. Students favoured different perspectives, types of information and linguistic formulations in their texts, in a continuum between particularistic, context-dependent principles, and universalistic standard-oriented principles, whose characteristics were closer to the prototypical descriptive text. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on ethnographic data of an urban school, this paper contrasts how two White female teachers take up the idea of ‘teaching for social justice.’ Fourth-grade teacher Maestra Rachel enacts a superficial understanding focused solely on curricular topics, while third-grade teacher Maestra Jennifer roots her teaching in an understanding of how students experience racial oppression in school. These cases demonstrate that a praxis of justice attends to curriculum and power, relationships, pedagogy, achievement, and identity. White teachers, specifically, must interrogate the role of Whiteness in their teaching, or they risk engaging in virtue signaling that reproduces injustice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Computational thinking (CT) has attracted significant interest among many educators around the globe. Despite this growing interest, research on CT and programming education in elementary school remains at an initial stage. Many relevant studies have adopted only one type of method to assess students' CT, which may lead to an incomplete view of student development on CT, while other studies employed small sample sizes, which may increase the chance of assuming a false premise to be true. Moreover, conventional programming courses typically have two limitations (e.g., limited student active learning and student low engagement). Given these gaps, this study investigates the effects of a theory-based (5E framework) flipped classroom model (FCM) on elementary school students' understanding of CT concepts, computational problem-solving performance, and perceptions of flipped learning. To achieve this, a pretest-posttest quasi-experimental study was conducted in a rural elementary school, including 125 students in the experimental group and 122 students in the control group. The results showed that the 5E-based FCM significantly improved student understanding of CT concepts and computational problem-solving abilities. The results also revealed positive student perception toward the FCM. The benefits and challenges of the 5E-based FCM are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]