In this article, the author presents a short teaching sequence to show how to introduce young students in grades 3 (ages 8-9) and 4 (ages 9-10) to using digital tools for exploring larger and multivariate data sets. The teacher guided the young students from creating bar graphs in small data sets on embodied cognition and enactive levels to…

Since many decisions in politics, economics, and social sciences are based on statistics, statistical literacy is a key component for an active citizen. Statistical skills and statistical reasoning can already be enhanced in primary school. Therefore, not only in Germany, statistics is an element of the primary-school curriculum, which usually…

Because students have often been conditioned as passive learners and receivers of knowledge, it can be difficult for them to persevere in solving authentic problems. Nevertheless, teachers must persist in preparing students as problem solvers and critical thinkers. In an urban inner-city neighborhood school in the southeast, students embarked on a…

How can we, as teachers, encourage students to move from drawing geometric objects to constructing them and thereby build their mathematical reasoning skills? One way to encourage students to construct instead of draw shapes and to help students develop more robust understandings of geometric relationships and constructions is to use interactive…

With the rise of personal desktop 3D printing, a wide spectrum of educational opportunities has become available for educators to leverage this technology in their classrooms. Until recently, the ability to create physical 3D models was well beyond the scope, skill, and budget of many schools. However, since desktop 3D printers have become readily…

When evaluators plan site-randomized experiments, they must conduct the appropriate statistical power analyses. These analyses are most likely to be valid when they are based on data from the jurisdictions in which the studies are to be conducted. In this method note, we provide software code, in the form of a SAS macro, for producing statistical…

Classroom instruction about other cultures all too often resembles the Disney version of "It's a Small World" with Fantasyland-like cultural stereotypes, ceremonial activities, and traditional dress that can lead to serious misunderstandings about the depth and complexity of global societies. Social studies instruction presents the…

This article features Point Road School, a pre-K-4 school in New Jersey that enhances student learning by integrating new and emerging technologies into the curriculum. Point Road School's technology story began in 1996 with a grant for a classroom modem so students could email their university literacy buddies. The New Jersey school has moved…

Most children talk to their parents about what they learned at school. Parents hear about books read, pictures drawn, stories written and games played. But how often do parents hear of children using ICT to make multimedia stories with a mathematical focus? In this paper the term "multimodality" will be used to describe such activities.…

This article addresses issues surrounding critical media literacy using popular culture texts. The authors focus on the example of their work with a fourth-grade class involved in a project to unpack the messages of popular media and advertising texts. This project, which they call the Elementary Bubble Project, was inspired by guerilla artist Ji…

In the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), Congress called for the U.S. Department of Education (ED) to conduct a rigorous study of the conditions and practices under which educational technology is effective in increasing student academic achievement. A 2007 report presenting study findings for the 2004-2005 school year, indicated that, after one…

In recent years effective instruction in reading for learners with physical and educational disabilities has received great attention in the schools. However, instruction in the corollary skill of writing has received considerably less emphasis. This review paper notes that through the use of assistive technology, students with a variety of…

This paper extends the theory of conditional covariances to polytomous items. It has been proven that under some mild conditions, commonly assumed in the analysis of response data, the conditional covariance of two items, dichotomously or polytomously scored, given an appropriately chosen composite is positive if, and only if, the two items…

The "Computer/Technology Skills Standard Course of Study" describes the progressive development of knowledge and skills in six strands: Societal and Ethical Issues, Database, Spreadsheet Keyboard Utilization/Word Processing/Desktop Publishing, Multimedia/Presentation, and Telecommunications/Internet. In the primary grades, the objectives…

Can second-grade students construct an understanding of sophisticated science processes and explore physics concepts while creating their own inventions? Yes! Students accomplished this and much more through a month-long project in which they used Legos and Robolab, the Lego computer programing software, to create their own inventions. One…