Math achievement plays a pivotal role in students' success in school and beyond. Algebra, in particular, serves as a crucial gateway: it increases the chances a student takes advanced math in high school, which has implications for their college and career prospects. In 2023 and 2024, the American Mathematics Educator Study (AMES) surveyed…

The Forest School approach has become very popular in recent years, with many schools offering this educational experience as part of the regular school day. Forest School provides children with the opportunity to engage with the outdoor environment as part of learning, increasing the amount of time children spend outside in the natural world. The…

The case study described in this article focused on a topic of real national concern, landslides, which can trigger sudden and tragic environmental problems and bring considerable loss of life. Landslides occur in many parts of Thailand, for example on mountain slopes, areas eroded by water or areas with rock degradation (Department of Mineral…

In sub-Saharan Africa, the loss of teaching hours due to teacher absenteeism corresponds to a waste of approximately 46 cents for every US dollar invested in education, an annual wastage of 1-3% of GDP. This brief summarizes the results of research in 11 countries in West and Central Africa under the Time to Teach study, a project in UNICEF that…

When the author became a public-school teacher and decided to teach second-grade students about Jane Goodall, he could not find literature appropriate for seven-year-olds. Children's books about her lifework simply did not exist. So, the author used an encyclopedic entry and the knowledge he had from the documentary to form his own text, which was…

This article describes a self-guided, story-like game with creative drawing for grades 3-5 that teaches the evolution concepts of adaptation, natural selection, ecosystem dynamics, inheritance, and mutation following the "Next Generation Science Standards" ("NGSS"). Drawing reinforces concepts through emphasis on students'…

Mathematics instruction tend to center solely on mathematics or children's mathematical thinking and not also on connecting to their interests or their home and community knowledge and experiences. To be responsive to students, teachers must make an intentional effort to integrate a focus on mathematics, children's mathematical thinking, and…

Front Street Primary School, situated near Gateshead in the north east of England, has been teaching its children about the 17 Sustainable Development Goals set by the United Nations. These goals have the power to create a better world by 2030, aiming to end poverty, fight inequality and address the urgent challenge of climate change. The year 2…

To be ready to learn, children need to be focused, engaged, and able to bounce back from setbacks. However, many children come to school with heightened or diminished physiological arousal due to exposure to poverty-related risks. While stress physiology plays a role in explaining how adversity relates to processes that support students' cognitive…

Baiba Krumins Grazzini has generously transformed her lecture, delivered at the AMI-USA Refresher Course in 2014, into a legacy article. This article establishes the role of storytelling in Cosmic Education while capturing both the whole and the detailed parts of Montessori Cosmic Education. Working from the early childhood transition into the…

Increasing global pressure to enhance teacher quality has led to increasing numbers of new ITE programmes, yet there is a dearth of policy studies interrogating exactly how both macro and micro-policy processes combine to shape the development of these programmes. This article examines one particular new programme--the MSc Transformative Learning…

In this article, the author describes two lessons in which students applied the scientific knowledge learned from studying offshore oil drilling to construct a fact-based argument on the topic and then communicate it to their policy makers, since public commentary was solicited. The students practiced using their scientific knowledge to…

The purpose of geography education is to foster the development of citizens who will actively seek and systematically apply the knowledge and skills of geography in life situations. Geography education must be responsive to the abilities and needs of students and to the societal and workplace requirements of the community, the nation, and the…

The authors open this article with a description of an incident that happened in 1992, when 28,800 rubber bath toys (i.e., ducks, frogs, turtles, and beavers) fell off a cargo ship in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. In 2009, these rubber bath toys were still washing ashore on beaches all around the world. This science instruction can be used with…

Evolution and inheritance appear in the new National Science Curriculum for England, which comes into effect from September 2014. In the curriculum documents, it is expected that pupils in year 6 (ages 10-11) should be taught to: (1) recognise that living things have changed over time; (2) recognise that living things produce offspring of the same…