Following a massive wave of school closures during the COVID-19 pandemic, educators found the need to be hyper-critical of how they spend their instructional time with students. Almost all students are expected to return nearly a full grade-level behind and would likely have to learn to navigate a completely new school environment. As a result,…

In this article, we discuss tensions that emerged as we collaborated with teachers to iteratively design and refine an afterschool reading intervention approach that emphasizes inquiry and disciplinary learning for upper elementary readers positioned as struggling in school. Our findings are organized around four design tensions that help us…

The world, and especially our own country, is in dire need of a larger and more diverse population of computer scientists. While many organizations have approached this problem of too few computer scientists in various ways, a promising, and I believe necessary, path is to expose elementary students to authentic practices of the discipline.…

This intervention mixed methods study used a quasi-experimental design to investigate the effects of an after-school book club on third-grade boys' reading achievement, attitudes, and preferences. During the 2015-2016 school year, seven third-grade boys from a South Texas elementary school attended an after-school book club in their school library…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to discuss how the superhero genre, when couched in a space and project that seek to act as a counter-world and is rooted in the life experiences of youth, can allow Latinx elementary school students the opportunity to create counter-stories. Such stories facilitated the process of creating "critical…

Altruism is recognized as "a cultural behavior, well beyond instinctive behavior, and even beyond adaptive social behaviors with respect to evolutionary processes" (Wilson, 1998, p. 29) Yet, if artmaking is a cultural behavior it is one that does not appear at first "to contribute to the survival of the species" (Wilson, 1998,…

This study examined associations between multiple parental behaviors and children's participation in out-of-school math, science, and computer activities for children in 2nd (n = 125), 3rd (n = 123), and 5th grade (n = 200). Mothers and fathers reported how often they encouraged their children's activities, participated in activities with their…