Most children experience some form of grouping in the classroom every day. Understanding how teachers make grouping decisions and their impacts on children's social development can shed light on effective teacher practices for promoting positive social dynamics in the classroom. This study examined the influence of teachers' grouping strategies on…

The purpose of this pilot study is to analyze the efficacy of a program that combines fine motor activities, animated models, exercises on a digital tablet and paper-pencil exercises. The 10-week program with a 45-minute session and daily exercises was implemented in a class of 16 students of first grade (mean age = 6.9 years old), with another…

This paper reports the results of the improving thinking skills (ITS-1) intervention study on the thinking skills of low-achieving first graders. The intervention programme consists of 12 lessons, each lasting for 45 min. Lessons offer enriched-discovery learning activities and tasks to be solved through inductive reasoning. We used a…

Teachers are asked to examine the potential opportunities for connecting themes of childhood play to the skills, habits of the mind, and principles of the disciplines. A comparative analysis of the explanations of first graders and the perceptions of their teachers, in separate focus groups, revealed a disparity in the significance of narrative…

The authors' primary aim was to investigate a potential causal relationship between spatial ability and math ability. To do so, they used a pretest-training-posttest experimental design in which children received short-term spatial training and were tested on problem solving in math. They focused on first and second graders because earlier studies…

The purpose of this study was to determine the relationship between the Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS), the Reading Recovery Observation Survey (RROS) early reading sub-tests, and the reading achievement of Native American first-graders as measured by the Stanford 10. A causal-comparative correlation research design…

The 4Rs Program (Reading, Writing, Respect and Resolution) is a "dual focus" whole school universal intervention designed to promote literacy development and social-emotional learning, that is currently being rigorously evaluated using a school-randomized trial of 18 elementary schools (9 intervention, 9 control) in New York City. The…