Considering the increasing severity of environmental disasters and the scarcity of studies centered on children's perspectives, this article explores context-based learning to create spaces of hope. Constructing explanations fosters meaning creation and knowledge integration. Fourth graders' self-explanations about contamination in a degraded…

Students with mature number sense make sense of numbers and operations, use reasoning to notice patterns, and flexibly select the most effective and efficient problem-solving strategies (McIntosh et al., 1997; Yang, 2005). Despite being highlighted in national standards and policy documents (CCSS, 2010; NCTM, 2000), the association between…

The applicability of digital technologies is increasing boundlessly and so are the opportunities of the end-users, with ample opportunities to embed these technologies in the teaching and learning process. Nonetheless, classroom adoption of technologies, particularly in mathematics remains on the lower end of innovation in teaching and learning.…

Causal reasoning is important to children's cognition and academic development. However, there have been few empirical studies on the impact of visual cues and non-verbal scaffolding on children's reasoning in continuous causal processes. Hence, the present study aims to explore how causal reasoning in continuous processes is facilitated by visual…

This quantitative causal-comparative study investigated the growth performance scores of English learners in grades three through five in reading, mathematics, and science in four English language educational programs: English as Second Language (ESL), Transitional Bilingual Education (TBE), Dual-Language Immersion (DLI), and No Services. I used…

Background/Context: State-funded prekindergarten has expanded rapidly in the U.S., and there are expectations that it will have longer-term positive effects on later academic and nonacademic outcomes (e.g., Phillips et al., 2017). There is strong evidence of pre-k effects on measures of kindergarten readiness (e.g., Gormley et al., 2005; Weiland…

Research has focused on students' difficulties understanding phenomena in which agency is distributed across actors whose individual-level behaviors converge to result in collective outcomes. Building on Levy and Wilensky (2008), this study identified features of distributed causality students understand and that may offer affordances for…

Understanding complex systems requires reasoning about causal relationships that behave or appear to behave probabilistically. Features such as distributed agency, large spatial scales, and time delays obscure co-variation relationships and complex interactions can result in non-deterministic relationships between causes and effects that are best…

The authors open this article with a description of an incident that happened in 1992, when 28,800 rubber bath toys (i.e., ducks, frogs, turtles, and beavers) fell off a cargo ship in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. In 2009, these rubber bath toys were still washing ashore on beaches all around the world. This science instruction can be used with…

We present evidence suggesting that the effect of self-explanations on learning is not always beneficial and, in fact, in some contexts has a detrimental effect. Over eight sessions, fourth-graders engaged in investigation of a database with the goal of identifying causal effects. In a separate task, children in one condition also generated…

Some form of a short interrupted time series (ITS) is often used to evaluate state and national programs. An ITS design with a single treatment group assumes that the pretest functional form can be validly estimated and extrapolated into the postintervention period where it provides a valid counterfactual. This assumption is problematic. Ambiguous…

Inspiring and motivating students to pursue science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education continues to be an important educational focus in the United States. Robotics programs are one strategy developed to accomplish this goal. This causal comparative study focused on investigating whether a causal relationship exists between…

This study examined the average effects of schools' third through fifth grade gifted programming policy in mathematics and reading on overall school achievement, on gifted students' achievement and academic attitudes and on nongifted students' achievement and academic attitudes. Data and results represent a broad, national look at school…

Causal inference is central to educational research, where in data analysis the aim is to learn the causal effects of educational treatments on academic achievement, to evaluate educational policies and practice. Compared to a correlational analysis, a causal analysis enables policymakers to make more meaningful statements about the efficacy of…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between school-based organizational structures that support teachers' development of Personalized Education Plans (PEPs) and their quality as written for third through fifth grade students in each of two Title I schools. A causal comparative design was implemented. Teachers' responses…