Learning and teaching mathematics can be challenging, especially considering its importance for academic, occupational, and personal success, yet disparities persist in achievement among diverse racial and ethnic groups. Racial inequality, educational bias, and injustice impact success in mathematics education, with White and Asian-American…

Children's white matter development is driven by experience, yet it remains poorly understood how it is shaped by attending formal education. A small number of studies compared children before and after the start of formal schooling to understand this, yet they do not allow to separate maturational effects from schooling-related effects. A clever…

This action research study in a North Dakota public school addresses the need for effective professional development (PD) to enhance instruction and academic outcomes for mathematically promising learners. Despite annual PD investments, concerns persist regarding the limited efficacy of short-term workshops (Knight & Skrtic, 2021; Kraft et…

Research Findings: The present study analyzes whether child factors are linked to variations in teacher cognitive activation (CA) among individual children in math-related activities within Chinese kindergarten classrooms. The findings show that teachers tend to provide direct CA with high concreteness and that child engagement with tasks is…

The purpose of this quantitative, correlational study was to discover the influence of teacher-student relationships on teachers' math self-efficacy and math anxiety in first through third-grade students. This research was significant since the results inform and guide educational training, evaluations, and classroom management. This study was…

This study examined the development of self-efficacy among third-grade girls in a low-achieving school setting. Self-efficacy is defined as an individual's belief in their capabilities to attain desired outcomes, as described by Schillinger et al. (2021). This belief plays a significant role in influencing academic performance, social…

The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted traditional learning in schools with the sudden shift to distance learning. Schools continue to see the effects of this shift but must better understand the academic effects on students. The purpose of this study was to determine the extent of COVID Learning Loss in the mathematics and reading scores of elementary…

In this study we investigated the development of 245 kindergarteners' mathematics problem solving (MPS) at two time points within 7 months using a cognitive diagnostic test, which measured three cognitive components (mathematical knowledge and skills, semantic understanding, and quantitative reasoning) with eleven cognitive attributes. The effects…

At the start of every school year, teachers typically wonder what their new students know coming into the grade level. Sometimes, though, they place too much emphasis on what children do not know or have forgotten over summer break. After all, those gaps can be glaring. Helping their students grow is like helping an acorn grow; they must watch for…

This study examined one school district's attempt to accelerate the academic learning of a population of incoming kindergarten students through the students' participation in a pilot summer incoming-kindergarten intervention program known as Summer Learning Academies (SLA). The analyses examined the end-of-year (EOY) reading and mathematics…

This article presents the correlation analyses of mathematics item response theory scores from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 1998 and 2010 data, and proposes the critical need for systematic efforts to improve the quality of pre- and in-service teachers of young children in teaching mathematics.

Background: Women and under-represented minority (URM) students continue to be under-represented in STEM and earn the lowest proportion of undergraduate engineering degrees. We employed a mixed methods research approach grounded in social capital theory to investigate "when" they first consider pursuing engineering as a college degree…

Children (n = 747; 6.5 years) were assessed on domain-general processes and mathematics and reading-related competencies (start of first grade), addition retrieval (end of second grade), and calculations and word reading (end of third grade). Attentive behavior, reasoning, visuospatial memory, and rapid automatized naming (RAN) indirectly…

Children's worrying about their academic performance has profound implications for their learning and wellbeing in school. Understanding the contextual and psychological antecedents of students' worry thus represents an important area of research. Drawing on Eccles and colleagues' expectancy-value theory and Pekrun's control-value theory and using…

Developing fluency in arithmetic facts is instrumental to mathematics learning. This study compares the effects of two practice conditions on children's fluency in simple multiplication facts. Third and fourth graders in the Netherlands (N = 282) practised in either a conventional "recall" condition where they produced answers to…