Understanding science allows students with and without developmental and behavioral-based (DB) disabilities to better appreciate the world around them as well as prepare them for the growing science-related job market. However, students in the United States consistently underperform on science achievement tests compared to students from other…

Back-and-forth conversations with adults are critical for developing children's language, and, therefore, an important part of the early childhood classroom learning environment; however, the specific nature of teacher feedback, one component of teacher-child conversations, on child language has not been widely studied. This article examined…

This study addressed the effects of Strategies for Teaching Reading, Information, and Vocabulary Effectively (STRIVE), a distributed professional development (PD) model designed to help teachers implement reading comprehension and vocabulary practices in fourth grade social studies classes. Schools (n = 81 schools, n = 235 teachers, n = 4,757…

Student achievement disparities in inclusive science classrooms are concerning, as knowledge about science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) is increasingly important for upward mobility. When students identify with multiple marginalized sociocultural groups, progress becomes more troubling, as the interplay among these factors is…

In the context of the critical need to support children's early language development, teacher knowledge may enhance children's opportunities to build linguistic skills. In this study we explored how early childhood teachers' (n = 86) pedagogical content knowledge for language and vocabulary, and their book-reading implementation across the school…

Young children seem to pick up words quickly, almost effortlessly, through various media in the early years. Studies have shown that storybooks, TV, screen media, and ebooks can all be sources for incidental word learning without formal instruction. Yet, typically, research has investigated learning from a single medium in isolation or in…

Higher-order thinking is relational reasoning in which multiple representations are linked together, through inferences, comparisons, abstractions, and hierarchies. We examine the development of higher-order thinking in 64 preschool-aged children, observed from 14 to 58 months in naturalistic situations at home. We used children's spontaneous talk…

Organized semantic representations encoding across- and within-domain distinctions are a hallmark of mature cognition, and understanding how they change with experience and learning is a key endeavor in developmental science. Existing computational modeling studies provide a mechanistic framework for understanding how structured semantic…

Engaging in frequent, meaningful conversation during the early years of schooling is foundational for children's literacy development. Specifically, developing oral language through daily conversations is essential for language comprehension, and eventually, reading comprehension. In this article, we discuss how teachers can use the…

Purpose: There are many aspects of words that can influence our lexical processing, and the words we are exposed to influence our opportunities for language and reading development. The purpose of this study is to establish a more comprehensive understanding of the lexical challenges and opportunities students face. Method: We explore the latent…

This study reports the effects of a distributed professional development model emphasizing reading comprehension and vocabulary practices in social studies on the content knowledge, vocabulary, and reading comprehension outcomes of upper elementary students identified as English learners (ELs). Schools were randomly assigned to one of three…

This study evaluated the feasibility of the Knowledge, Language, and Inquiry (K.L.I.) intervention, designed to support Grades 3-5 multilingual students classified as English learners (ML-ELs) in building content knowledge, language skills, and reading comprehension through inquiry-based small-group instruction. Feasibility was examined across…

Dual language learner children (DLLs) benefit from early childhood education (ECE) and learning multiple languages, but research has predominantly focused on English monolingual children, with limited insight on the ECE and early development of DLLs. This study investigated whether DLLs' developmental assets assessed at pre-k entry (i.e. English…

Introduction: The current study examined the extent to which static and dynamic measures of vocabulary and word learning predicted response and identified poor responders to a vocabulary intervention. Methods: Participants were 46 preschool children in classrooms randomly assigned to complete the Story Friends intervention in two…

This paper describes a new automated disengagement tracking system (DTS) that detects learners' maladaptive behaviors, e.g. mind-wandering and impetuous responding, in an intelligent tutoring system (ITS), called AutoTutor. AutoTutor is a conversation-based intelligent tutoring system designed to help adult literacy learners improve their reading…