This executive summary presents results from a study that began in 2013-2014, and involves a longitudinal design to follow a sample of 1,169 children (139 Spanish-speaking DLLs) who attended 199 randomly-selected Georgia's Pre-K classrooms. These findings focus on results from the second year of the study, which included 1,034 of these children…

This the executive summary of the 2013-2014 study which provided the baseline year for the longitudinal study. The study included observations of teaching practices in a random sample of 199 Georgia's Pre-K classrooms and assessments of the language, literacy, math, general knowledge, and behavior skills of a sample of 1,169 children attending…

This paper developed a Democratic Classroom Survey to measure students' perceived democratic environment of the classroom. Perceived democratic environment is one of the most important variables for understanding classroom activity and indeed any type of group activity, but actually measuring perceptions in an objective manner has been…

Designing investigative skills sessions for key stage 5 students based on field research in the Ghanaian savannah prompted reflection on the similarities and differences in the ways farmers and students learned about and applied scientific methodology. Circumstantial constraints mean that farmers' experiments were less controlled than those…

Professionals in education commonly cite classroom and student disruptions as one of the most difficult and persistent problems impacting many schools today. New teachers are especially susceptible though many experienced faculty members struggle as well. The discernible (and unknown) variables which define or create management issues are far too…

Dealing with difficult behavior is a matter of awareness of the factors involved in prediction, prevention, and instruction. This means three things: Teachers know, or can be assisted in thinking through the environmental events and contexts that are associated with higher probabilities of problem behavior. Second, teachers can actively manipulate…

Research conducted in preschool classrooms has long relied on measures of classroom quality that were developed in the 1980s based on theory and data available at that time. They examine classroom quality broadly, provide limited detail about supports for pre-academic instruction, and only weakly predict variation in children's acquisition of…

This article reviews some basic issues related to school violence. As observed by the practicing teachers and other educators who have been quoted in this article, adults who serve as role models to children and adults who respect, listen, and share will increase the students' awareness of the need to use assertive, non-aggressive behaviors in and…

Ongoing efforts to include social contextual dynamics in research on mathematics education require theoretical frameworks that allow researchers to zoom their focus out to include the social sphere (Lerman, 1998). This is especially important when studying teacher development, as teachers learn in a wide variety of social contexts. Here we…

This paper describes several tools that the regular and special education teacher can use to ensure that modifications for students with hearing impairments in the regular classroom are both available and of sufficient quality. First, the Mainstream Success Index, an aid to interpreting test scores for the purpose of making educational decisions,…

We propose a multidimensional model that can be used to formulate a research agenda that aims to explore how innovations in teaching and instruction influence the science of learning within educational contexts. This model depicts the complexity of relationships between variables within: classrooms, the total school program, and inside and outside…