A school-based nutrition education intervention was implemented with second and third graders who used their functional health literacy skills of reading, writing, and speaking to learn about the MyPlate food model from the United States Department of Agriculture. The pretest-posttest intervention determined if children had ever seen the MyPlate…

Families play an essential role in their children's academic, social, and emotional development. Many families want to support their children's learning but are unsure of how to do so. It is an important task of schools to find ways to engage students' families and help them support their children's learning at home. This study explored the…

In the last decade, interactive touchscreen devices have become ubiquitous in young children, and toddlers first experience touchscreen technology before two. Although parents have a vital role in developing the home environment as a stimulus for development, they also have conflicting views on the appropriateness of using apps to deliver…

Young children bring rich social, cultural, and political knowledge to school, cultivated in their homes and communities. This knowledge, ranging from household skills to multilingual practices, is often marginalized in schools that value different norms. Drawing from ethnographic studies in Illinois and New York kindergarten classrooms, this…

Integrating multiple theoretical frameworks, the authors examined rising first- to fourth-grade students' mathematics utility conceptions--their knowledge and beliefs about the usefulness of mathematics, home-based mathematics engagement, and grade-level differences in mathematics utility conceptions and home engagement. Most children viewed…

Taking a sociocultural perspective, this qualitative case study aims to contribute, investigate, and understand how young Mexican American emergent bilingual learners engage in early science experiences. Furthermore, the study focuses on how the students manifested their knowledge, understanding, and perceptions about science and its…

An innovative DVD of classic nursery rhymes and stories empowered at-risk kindergarten children to control in the home when and how much they listen, promoting better listening, reading, and overall literacy comprehension skills. Coupled with modest teacher training, and limited use in the classroom, the DVD generated dramatic vocabulary growth in…

We examined the double deficit hypothesis (Wolf & Bowers, 1999) and literacy development in a longitudinal dataset of 1,006 Finnish children who were nonreaders at school entry. A single phonological awareness (PA) deficit was a predictor of pseudoword spelling accuracy and reading fluency, and a single rapid automatized naming (RAN) deficit…

A number of studies, both small scale and of nationally-representative student samples, have reported substantial associations between school entry math ability and later elementary school achievement. However, questions remain regarding the persistence of the association between early growth in math ability and later math achievement due to the…