Learning to spell is a difficult but essential task for children learning to read. Several spelling tasks involving different cognitive demands are used in classroom. To provide better guidance for teaching practices, a critical question is whether spelling performance of beginner readers is task dependent. The present study focuses on the…

While programming was introduced to mathematics classrooms in the 1980s, emerging robotic technologies have encouraged more widespread integration of these technologies to support the development of K-12 students' mathematical reasoning. The recent emphasis of programming and computational thinking in K-12 education has highlighted the need to…

Block building activities help develop students' spatial reasoning, but few studies focus on the development of block building skills beyond preschool. We worked with four kindergarten, four first grade, and four second grade students to learn more about their Lego block building. We compared students' accuracy, building strategies, and spatial…

Picture books have the potential to engage students in multimodal ways of learning in early education setting. This pilot study aims to investigate the efficacy of using picture books specifically written to convey increasingly complex ecosystem concepts and their influence on introducing ecoliteracy to first-grade students. Under the central…

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…

For the 2014 study, "The Iterative Development and Initial Evaluation of We Have Skills!, an Innovative Approach to Teaching Social Skills to Elementary Students", researchers examined the effects of We Have Skills! (WHS), a supplemental, video-based social skills program for early elementary students. WHS consists of three components:…

This study examined first-grade students' journal writing to determine how placing live zoo animals in classrooms for science education links to students' emergent and early writing. Students were asked to write journal entries during the daily language arts period. Although no direct instruction in informational text writing was offered, teachers…

This paper reports on an investigation into the quality of the learning experiences for 4-5-year-old children in Northern Ireland schools in the context of the debate about play-based and formal approaches to learning and teaching. Detailed observations were carried out in 70 Year 1 classes: 38 in traditional Year 1 classes where the Northern…