Inquiry is the essence of social studies, and inquiry "looping" in social studies curricula means offering students opportunities to engage in inquiry in regular intervals and in a coherent fashion within and across grade levels. This can benefit the youngest students since they are filled with hope and want to make a difference in the…

With mounting polarization in the political arena and media sources, trust of one's neighbors and of teachers are facing increasing strain in the United States. Furthermore, teachers continue to struggle with how to teach high-quality, nuanced, social studies, especially in the elementary setting, where time and resources for social studies has…

Despite the increasing popularity of studies on teachers' national curriculum adaptations, there is no comparative study elucidating teachers' adaptations in centralized and decentralized educational contexts through sense-making theory lenses. This paper presents a comparative case study of Turkish and Swedish senior classroom teachers'…

Success in social studies is imperative, as civic literacy skills are used by students to become critical consumers of information and support making informed decisions. The problem is that teachers are making instructional shifts to support literacy performance and provide instruction for struggling readers in third and fourth grade to read,…

This study explores a third-grade teacher's (Deb) developing knowledge and practice for incorporating representations into her teaching of science over the course of 2 years. Data was gathered from the same science unit (Rock Formation) over 2 years, and consisted of video of seven lessons, one of which was the same lesson taught over both years.…

This study explores using a guided note-taking strategy to address the issue of low listening skills among students. The primary aim is to evaluate the effectiveness of this strategy in strengthening listening skills. Conducted as qualitative research using a descriptive method, the study involved a school principal, classroom teachers, and three…

Background: Initial teacher education (ITE) research in South Africa shows gaps in preservice teachers' (PSTs) primary mathematics knowledge. Aim: We study the mental mathematics understandings and teaching experiences of three PSTs who achieved high gains for learners they taught mental mathematics to using the Mental Starters Assessment Project…

Providing opportunities for students to demonstrate their mathematical thinking can be challenging. This paper reports on a case study conducted with a teacher and her class of Grade 3/4 students which investigated this phenomenon. Following collection of baseline data that showed her students were not demonstrating evidence of mathematical…

This ethnographically-oriented, multi-year study examined an epistolary writing relationship between third grade students and the teacher's uncle, known to them as Uncle Billy, who, at the time of the study, was corresponding from prison. Taking place within a Reformed Christian school, this study encapsulates the pedagogy of Ms. Thompson, the…

This causal-comparative study analyzed third grade reading scores from the National Center for Education Statistics, Early Childhood Longitudinal Study (ECLS) K-2011, by one of five school types, and four U.S. geographical regions. Forty-one of 50 states were represented. The problem studied is the unexplained elementary reading performance…

This article proposes ways to authentically amplify writer's workshop for emergent bilinguals. Through the study of one bilingual teacher's mediation in teaching, we examined the affordances that translanguaging and transmodal practices have for emergent bilingual students' writing processes. In this case study, we focused on a writing sequence…

Representation in science is anything that stands for something else--drawings, pictures, graphs, or other representational forms (Danish et al. 2020). Representations serve as public displays of phenomena that make aspects of those phenomena explicit (Gilbert 2008). They can serve to make the invisible visible, communicate ideas, display…

Limited professional training regarding elementary social studies content and pedagogy contributes to the reduction of elementary social studies instruction. The purpose of this descriptive phenomenological study was to explore how the experiences of elementary educators during the 2018 Alabama Bicentennial Summer Institutes held in Mobile,…

The purpose of this case study is to explore effects of digital gamification on engagement and achievement in a third-grade social studies course for students of multiple nationalities and with varied native languages attending the English language international branch of a private, affluent school in eastern China. The case study is framed by…

Background: Teachers are responsible for curriculum implementation and transformation. Therefore, they are viewed as the primary agents of change in teaching and learning. As agents of change, they are responsible for being innovative and creative in their teaching and learning in their English First Additional Language (EFAL) class. Objectives:…