An intervention using the unplugged programming and storytelling (UPS) strategy was implemented in this study to cultivate students' programming learning motivation and concepts. The participants were 49 second graders at a primary school in southern Taiwan. The course was conducted for 12 lessons (40 min each lesson). A quasi-experimental design…

Teaching that supports children in scientific sensemaking emphasizes discourse that prioritizes children's ideas and supports children in engaging in disciplinary practices. However, supporting science talk requires skillful instruction, and without support, teachers may find it challenging to engage our youngest students in rich discussions. In…

After the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak, the disruption of in-person schooling has significantly affected many students including emergent bilingual students. Designed as an ethnographic study, this research study examines two Spanish-English dual language bilingual education teachers' implementation of translanguaging pedagogies and language…

This study examines four of the most commonly-used core mathematics curricula in the USA for evidence of support for research-based instructional strategies for mathematics vocabulary in first and second grade. Content analyses of the teachers' editions of two units for each grade level were analyzed per curriculum (n = 16). Statistically…

California districts were forced to shift to distance learning models in the spring of 2020 and the transition to distance learning for students in the early grades--transitional kindergarten through third grade (TK-3)--has proved difficult for students, parents, and teachers alike. As distance learning persists, administrators and teachers can…

The authors, a team of literacy teacher educators who are focused on extending our own understandings of preservice teacher (PST) learning, conducted a cross-case analysis of how PSTs learned to teach literacy in three concurrent practicum experiences. We draw on Grossman's framework of representations, decompositions, and approximations to…

The purpose of this article is to describe the outcomes of a parallel curriculum project between life sciences and physical education. Throughout a 6-week period, students in grades two through five became members of teams that represented different animal species and biomes, and concurrently participated in a season of gymnastics skills and…

Students living in poverty continually score significantly lower than their more affluent peers on reading and writing achievement tests. One reason this literacy difference or gap may exist is a mismatch between students' background knowledge relevant to the text and the texts the students read daily in classrooms. It is well documented that…

For educators, the content of the curriculum really is like oxygen: it is the necessary precondition for improving schools, closing the achievement gap, engaging parents, and preparing teachers. However, when educators take the content of the curriculum for granted, they lose opportunities to coordinate and collaborate. Good curriculum instruction…

This paper explores how robotics can be used as a new educational tool in a Montessori early education classroom. It presents a case study of one early educator's experience of designing and implementing a robotics curriculum integrated with a social science unit in her mixed-age classroom. This teacher had no prior experience using robotics in…

Over the last several decades, research has questioned the effectiveness of the D.A.R.E.[c] (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) program. D.A.R.E.[c] has also experienced cuts based on budget restrictions and personnel reallocations within police agencies, as well as competing demands for classroom time. Although concerted efforts have been made to…

This article presents results from a case study analyzing the process of change for early childhood educators as they engage in a semester-long professional development (PD) experience focused on developing a teacher research agenda related to mathematics instruction. During this PD experience, 11 participants (5 second-grade and 6 third-grade…

Preparing teachers to implement a new curriculum presents a significant but important challenge. While formal professional development programs can assist in this preparation, finding prescribed experiences that meet the needs of all teachers can be formidable and indeed may not always be the best option for promoting change in practice. Decisions…

How this teacher develops composition of ten with second graders was dramatically reshaped by the 2006 release of NCTM's "Curriculum Focal Points." The release of "Curriculum Focal Points"--particularly the suggestion that number sense and computation be focal areas in the second-grade mathematics curriculum--resulted in positive changes in this…

The purpose of this study was to discover and compare perceptions of three different groups of Indiana elementary educators concerning the importance of areas of the principal's literacy knowledge base, as well as responsibility for and use of this knowledge by principals to adequately support effective research-based literacy instruction. The…