Rural schools in South Africa face many social and environmental challenges which impact negatively on learner wellbeing and performance. Given the severity and history of these problems, the situation is unlikely to change in the near future. Yet, schools are supposed to be enabling environments, providing holistic support to learners from…

Improving the reading ability of young students could hardly be a more urgent priority for our elementary schools. Two thirds of American fourth and eighth graders are not able to read proficiently--and the outcomes are far worse for students from disadvantaged backgrounds. The National Assessment of Educational Progress in 2019 showed that only…

This article examines the perspectives and feelings of children in the first two years of a music workshop developed with pupils from a state school in northern Portugal. The study followed a participatory action research design, with data including field notes, two group interviews with the children, children's artefacts, such as texts or…

The 1920s decade was extremely rich in terms of processes and problems of singular relevance and was also a prolific decade in terms of debates and generation of new proposals. The social climate of the postwar period put into crisis the most rationalist precepts installed by nineteenth-century liberalism and favoured the inclusion of forms of…

International commitment is to address all forms of imbalanced and discriminatory situations experienced within the education system. While students of secondary provision in many developed countries enjoy the liberty of choosing their desired subjects from different areas (i.e., science, business, and arts), students in some developing…

Background: Developing higher-order comprehension skills of learners in primary schools is a challenge that faces many countries. South Africa is no exception. Primary school learners in South Africa have particularly low literacy and comprehension skills: many learners struggle to read for understanding. There is little published scholarship that…

Universal design for learning (UDL) is a research-based framework intended to optimise student learning by including student choice of content, process, and product in design. The UDL model recommends presenting course content in multiple ways, providing students various options for engagement, and then facilitating choice in expressing knowledge…

Purpose: Following recent scholarship promoting the study of sports-related texts as a vehicle for examining sociopolitical issues, this study aims to identify methods and materials used to facilitate the extended exploration of sociopolitical issues in a secondary sports literature class and to establish how students describe their experiences…

We used longitudinal data on high school students in Washington State to assess the relationships between English Language Arts (ELA) teacher qualifications and the high school and postsecondary outcomes of their students, and whether these relationships differed for students with and without disabilities. We found that students assigned to…

Much research has noted the misalignment between kindergarten through 12th grade (K-12) academic standards and curriculum materials used in classrooms. Many states and education organizations have been pushing for greater use of standards-aligned curriculum, especially during the past several years. In this report, the authors share results…

When school is engaging, relevant, and meaningful, students returning from correctional facilities and those at-risk of dropping out are more likely to achieve educational success. This brief is intended to assist district leaders and school administrators--both at the district and school level- who are seeking to implement strategies designed to…

The Performance Evaluation for Alaska's Schools (PEAKS) assessment is administered annually statewide to students in grades 3 through 9 in ELA and mathematics. It provides students the opportunity to show their understanding of "Alaska's English Language Arts (ELA) and Mathematics Standards." The assessments provide information to…

The Arkansas Better Chance (ABC) program longitudinal study (2009-2020) reviews the changing circumstances and outcomes of participation in Pre-K services in Arkansas. The "core comparison" of this study is between ABC participants and students who had no known Pre-K participation but have similar household income levels. The results…

In this article, the authors share what they learned from their study of writing communities, which they refer to as writing groups, during the 2017-18 school year. The authors propose a conceptual framework for writing groups that engages students in the process of designing and participating as writers with their peers. The framework emphasizes…

Teachers' ineffectively use research-based reading instructional strategies with minority students in an urban middle school district in the Eastern United States. The purpose of this qualitative exploratory case study was to explore teachers' perceptions, experiences, and challenges when using research-based reading instructional strategies…