End-of-year student play days are frequently a tradition that provides elementary students an opportunity to be active in a fun, festive environment. Physical educators can use play days as a time to authentically assess their students while the students are enjoying the activities. Those planned by the students themselves have been found to be…

In 2 studies, an expectancy-value framework was applied to investigate effort expended on mathematics homework. In Study 1 (2,712 students in grades 5, 7, and 9; mean age=13.37 years), lower homework effort was found in higher grades. The effects of intrinsic value on homework effort were higher in the older cohorts, whereas the effects of the…

Grammar instruction has long been a troubling issue for many language arts teachers. This collaborative research between an elementary classroom teacher and university faculty, based on the assumption that grammar is most effectively taught in reading and writing, looks into the short- and long-term effect of error-based grammar instruction on the…

This article presents a case study of Mark Westin from his first to his fifth year of teaching fifth grade in an urban public school. Despite extreme management challenges and limited administrative support in a school with unusually high turnover, Mark persevered through his difficult novice years to become among the most respected and dedicated…

Panelists in an operational standard-setting study were asked to share their thoughts in written form at important points in the process itself--before the meeting started, after training, after completing the 1st and 2nd sets of ratings, immediately following the discussion between Rounds 1 and 2, and so on. The item mapping method of Plake and…

Correspondence journals between adults and elementary-school students promote child-centered discussion and learning that is often squeezed out of the curricula. Through an extended example of an exchange of letters between a fifth-grade classroom, including several English-language learners and a university classroom of preservice teachers, the…

The idea of using science notebooks as a classroom assessment tool is not new. There is general agreement that science notebooks allow teachers to assess students' conceptual and procedural understanding and to provide the feedback students need for improving their performance. In this study we examined the use of science notebooks as an…

We examined child characteristics of coping strategies, age, and gender as moderators of the association between family stressors and internalizing, externalizing, and peer rejection in a sample of 228 3rd-5th grade children. Consistent with previous research, children in the current study who experienced a higher number of family stressors were…

This study examined who among the 526 fourth to sixth graders are nominated as among the coolest kids in their class. There were two questions: (1) Are popular-aggressive (tough) children nominated as cool by a broad spectrum of their peers, or only by a select few? (2) Does variability in children's cool nominations more closely follow their…

One source of potential difficulty for struggling readers is the variability of texts across grade levels. This article explores the use of automatic natural language processing techniques to identify dimensions of variation within a corpus of school-appropriate texts. Specifically, we asked: Are there identifiable dimensions of lexical and…

The authors administered measures of loneliness, generalized trust beliefs in peers, and trust beliefs in specific familiar peers (i.e., opposite-gender peers, same-gender peers, close same-gender peers) to a sample of 63 children (33 girls, 30 boys) from 4th and 5th grades (M age = 10 years, 6 months). They assessed children's trusting behavior…

This paper introduces a study aimed at ascertaining students' beliefs about mathematics and mathematical learning, as well as developing those beliefs and related variables by changing the classroom learning environment. Eighty-six fifth graders were involved, divided in two groups: one in the innovative learning environment (N=46) and the other…

The study analyses the effects of training primary school children in the use of a linguistic tool called "Exploratory Talk" (ET) on their capacity for argumentation. ET allows for reasoned confrontation and negotiation of points of view, making the reasoning visible in the talk. Eighty-eight Mexican children from the 5th and 6th grades…

This study examined the effects of a multifaceted, metacognitive vocabulary intervention on the reading comprehension and vocabulary achievement of fifth-grade children in one of California's lowest performing Title I schools. Instruction was comprehensive, designed to facilitate encoding of student-selected words, mastery of clarifying…

This article examines ethnic segregation, defined as segregation among racial groups as well as between native-born and immigrant students, across elementary school classrooms in New York City. Specifically, the study compares patterns in within-school segregation across ethnic groups, grades, boroughs, and years. Current levels of within-school…