This book demonstrates a five-part framework for teachers, reading specialists, and literacy coaches who want to help their least engaged students become powerful readers. Merging theory and practice, the guide offers successful strategies to reach your "struggling" learners. The authors show how you can "turn-around" your instructional practice,…

One way to improve motivation and engagement for students with disabilities in academic areas is to teach at their level and increase their interest in the instruction and activities. Embedding these interests through offering students options within the curriculum can motivate students who were previously having difficulty or not interested in…

In this article, the author describes her experience of teaching Mandarin Chinese at Stopher Elementary School in Louisville, Kentucky. Through growing and learning with her students, the author has become a firm believer in the importance of early childhood language acquisition and a passionate advocate for world language education.

This is the fourth and final article in the "PE Metrics" series that focuses on assessing the National Standards for Physical Education (NASPE) for Standard 1. The first article focused on assessment of student learning. The second described formative and summative assessments and provided considerations on how to implement assessment within…

This article describes a fitness curriculum grounded in the sport education model. The curriculum consists of 18 lessons that were taught to fifth-grade students at a rural school in the South. All features of sport education--team affiliation, season, formal competition, culminating events, record keeping, and festivity--were preserved. The…

School climate is created through the combined culture of the adults and students within a school--both the culture they share as an organization and the diverse cultures they bring from home. This study compared the school climate of two elementary schools, one urban and one suburban, by measuring 179 fourth and fifth grade students' and 65…

Children's academic self-efficacy is one of the strongest predictors of achievement (Wigfield and Eccles, "Contemporary Educational Psychology" 25(1): 68-81, 2000). The present research examined mathematics self-efficacy and the relationship of racial context from the perspective of two competing bodies of research. Stereotype threat theory would…

The purposes of this study are to investigate fifth-graders' attitudes toward the Internet based on the 5-T framework (Tool, Toy, Telephone, Territory, and Treasure of Information), and to understand whether gender makes any difference in their attitudes. The data were obtained from 2,253 Taiwan fifth-grade students. Through a confirmatory factor…

This study aimed at learning parents' ideas about the values aimed to be taught in Social Studies lessons in the 4th and 5th grades of the primary education and about values education. Study data were collected by administering "the Values Education I" and "Values Education II" questionnaire forms developed by the researchers.…

In response to federal legislation and societal views that seek to provide free and appropriate education for each child. Public schools are now opening their doors to a wide variety of learners. General-education teachers are challenged to make their classrooms more inclusive. This year-long-ethnographic study explores the experiences of 20…

Sixty-one normally achieving and at-risk fifth-grade students (of whom three had learning disabilities), in three classrooms, were taught two 5-week science units via experimental or control conditions in which treatment order and unit of instruction were counterbalanced. In the control condition, students received typical instruction, with…

This article looks at best practices in basic writing instruction in terms of non-traditional audiences and writerly authority. Much conventional wisdom discourages participation in service-learning projects for basic writers because of the assumption that their writing is not yet ready to "go public." Countering this line of thinking, the author…

This study was a longitudinal extension of a random control trial of the Steps to Respect antibullying program. Students in Grades 3-5 were surveyed (n = 624) and observed on the playground (n = 360). Growth curve models of intervention students showed 2-year declines in playground bullying, victimization, nonbullying aggression, destructive…

The NCTM calls for the use of rich tasks that encourage students to apply their own reasoning to problem situations. When students work through algebraic generalization tasks, their reasoning often elicits a variety of strategies (Lannin 2003; Stacey 1989; Swafford and Langrall 2000). Challenges for teachers include facilitating student awareness…

Working to transform his classroom, fifth grade teacher John Blain of Buffalo (New York) public schools infused technology into his literature lessons by adding an online literature discussion to his more traditional classroom discussion. Students were assigned to read Kate DiCamillo's books "Because of Winn-Dixie" and "The Tiger…