How can educators encourage and better prepare students to pursue science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM)-based fields? To start, students are more likely to pursue these fields if they enjoy and perceive themselves to be good at them. This means introducing relevant concepts and skills at an early age and embedding them…

Noticing relationships between similar things and developing rules for treating things the same or differently, based on characteristics like color, size, shape, and texture provides the basis of beginning mathematics learning. Based on the view that teachers and parents of young children should provide children with age-appropriate words,…