This study aimed to address the need for a comprehensive assessment tool to evaluate the mathematical abilities of first-grade students through cognitive diagnostic assessment (CDA). The primary challenge involved in this endeavor was to delineate the specific cognitive skills and sub-skills pertinent to first-grade mathematics (FG-M) and to…

Children's school readiness implies their ability to adjust to the requirements imposed by school, to meet the teachers' criteria, to show progress in learning and to their abilities in general. The purpose of this research is to identify the critical incidents relating to children's school readiness. In the context of children's entry into…

In this paper, we report on the interim findings of a study that seeks to identify the characteristics of children's Critical Mathematical Thinking CMT. Characteristics of CMT were initially generated from a synthesis of relevant research literature and then validated using a case study methodology via trials in early childhood classrooms. This…

In this synthesis, we reviewed 65 studies involving elementary students (i.e., grades 1-5) identified with mathematics difficulty (MD) in which authors implemented a mathematics intervention. Of these studies, we identified 33 group designs, 9 quasi-experimental designs, and 23 single-case designs. We aimed to synthesize performance differences…

Fluent reading is characterized by rapid and accurate identification of words. It is commonly accepted that such identification relies on the availability of orthographic knowledge. However, whether this orthographic knowledge should be seen as an accumulation of word-specific knowledge in a lexicon acquired through decoding or as a well-developed…

Prior research has shown that EL classification is consequential for students, however, less is known about how EL classification impacts students' outcomes. In this study, we examine one hypothesized mechanism: teacher perceptions. Using nationally-representative data (ECLS-K:2011), we use coarsened exact matching to estimate the effect of EL…

When every child has the opportunity to meet his or her full potential, families, communities, and the nation's economic future strengthens. Remarkably, one in four American children come from low-income families and enter kindergarten not ready to learn and, as a result, fall behind from the very start. The nation pays a heavy price through…

This study examines the concurrent relationships between phoneme awareness, visual-verbal paired-associate learning, rapid automatized naming (RAN), and reading skills in 7- to 11-year-old children. Path analyses showed that visual-verbal paired-associate learning and RAN, but not phoneme awareness, were unique predictors of word recognition,…

The aim of the current study was to examine the effects of bilingualism on letter and category fluency tasks. Participants were 1,600 monolingual and bilingual children from three cities in Iran: Tehran (Persian monolinguals), Tabriz (Turkish-Persian bilinguals), and Sanandaj (Kurdish-Persian bilinguals). We separately presented nine Persian…

Categorizing organisms as living or nonliving things may seem to be intuitive by nature. Yet, it is regulated by scientific criteria. Students come to school with rules already in place. Their categorizing criteria have already been influenced by their personal experiences, also known as observations and inferences. They believe that all things…

Three studies are reported that assess 5-, 7- and 10-year-old children's cognitive inclusion of the ingroup in the self. Each study investigated a different ingroup: gender, family, and age group. Children were shown sets of cards identifying particular trait adjectives and were asked to rate the extent to which the traits applied to the self, the…

In a small-scale study of Information and Communication Technology (ICT)-rich primary school, interactive whiteboards (IWBs) were found to be the predominant ICT tools used by teachers. The study sought to identify how the teachers used features of ICT to enhance learning, based on a list of ICT's functions published for teacher education…

The ability of A level students to recognise and name common wild flowers was shown to be very poor. Trainee teachers performed little better and nearly a third of the practising A-level biology teachers tested were able to name only three or fewer wild flowers. Although opportunities exist at primary level for children to learn about the…