In an innovative, progressive school, students were asked to solve a fairly routine mathematical problem using real money in a "real-world" scenario. Even though the school values students' ideas, the reaction of the teacher to one student's alternative modelling of the problem suggests that he was expecting a particular answer to be…

Teachers can capitalize on the overwhelmingly visual nature of contemporary society for learning and teaching through integrating photography in their classroom instruction. In offering an alternative pathway for acquiring and expressing knowledge, photography has the potential to strengthen instruction across disciplines by drawing on multiple…

Almost half of Tennessee's students are not on grade level in reading and math by the time they complete third grade, and very few of those students achieve proficiency in later grades. To combat this trend and support the skill development and academic achievement of all students, Tennessee has adopted a framework for addressing individual…

This article evaluates the curriculum reform implemented in Turkey in 2004 by the Justice and Development Party (AKP). The curriculum reform targeted primary school education and reorganized the curriculum for several primary school courses. The AKP declared that renewed curricula would replace the former behaviorist approach, which had been…

The article explores how male primary school teachers view and relate to other people's expectations of them as teachers. The empirical data consists of interviews with seven teachers working in compulsory school grades three to five in a large-sized town in Sweden. The theoretical work on relations among masculinities developed by Connell and the…

The development and application of a framework that captures main characteristics of learning in nature--the Field Trip in Natural Environments (FiNE) framework--is the main outcome of this study that followed up 22 daily field trips of 4-6th grade students to nature parks. The theoretical and practical framework, which was developed based on the…

This project had two major goals: to determine the usefulness of individually-administered interview process to access elementary students' fluency with basic multiplication facts, and to determine whether a developmental sequence found in Australian mathematics education literature applied to elementary students in the United States. Students in…

The present research aims at pinpointing differences in spontaneous and non-spontaneous mental models of water cycle conceptions of two 4th grade student groups: the Jewish residents of a small provincial town and a group of students from an indigenous Bedouin community. Students' conceptions were elicited using the Repertory Grid technique as…

The author compared NCLB-prompted standards-based reforms with earlier reforms and found that earlier manifestations of standards-based reforms may have been more productive and constructive. NCLB, with its emphasis on accountability through high-stakes testing, has produced many perverse results alongside documented achievement gains, the author…

The Wallace Foundation is funding a multiyear demonstration project to determine whether voluntary, district summer learning programs can stem summer learning loss for low-income students. Six districts--Boston, Cincinnati, Dallas, Duval County (Florida), Pittsburgh, and Rochester, New York--were selected for the demonstration project and…

Radical constructivists advocate discovery-based pedagogical regimes that enable students to incrementally and continuously adapt their cognitive structures to the instrumented cultural environment. Some sociocultural theorists, however, maintain that learning implies discontinuity in conceptual development, because novices must appropriate expert…

The purpose of the present study was to investigate students' perceptions of their experiences with literature circles across elementary grades. A stratified random sample of 24 diverse students in grades one, three, four, and five were individually interviewed to obtain perceptions of their attitudes toward literature circles and their…

This article explores a Special Educational Needs Coordinator's experience of progressing from a "mainstream + SEN" approach to inclusion, defined as an extrinsically inclusive model, and perhaps more closely aligned to integration, towards a model of intrinsic inclusiveness. A three-tiered reading/spelling programme was implemented, using a…

This paper explores the voices of elementary children in public schools. Three databases were used including (a) interviews with 25 elementary students, (b) drawings and writings created by 225 third through sixth-grade students about their high stakes testing experiences, and (c) observations in two first-grade classrooms. The data demonstrate…

Scholarship on parent-principal relationships often ignores how some parental involvement can create challenges for school leaders. We analyze parent-principal relationships at an urban public K-8 school over a 30-year period, exploring how three different principals "managed" parental involvement. Our analysis reveals how these…