Purpose: A growing trend in instructional improvement efforts is the use of formative assessment informed by research-based developmental trajectories of how students gain deeper understanding of subject matter content over time. This article reports the findings of a large-scale experimental study of an innovative mathematics professional…

In this article, I analyze episodes from two third-grade classrooms drawn from a larger classroom teaching experiment to explore how these students began to incorporate nonnumerical symbols in their mathematical expressions when asked to represent indeterminate quantities. The article addresses two research questions: What understandings did these…

This study aims to understand the differences in student learning outcomes and classroom behaviour when using the interpersonal computer, personal computer and pen-and-paper to solve arithmetic exercises. In this multi-session experiment, third grade students working on arithmetic exercises from various curricular units were divided into three…

When evaluators plan site-randomized experiments, they must conduct the appropriate statistical power analyses. These analyses are most likely to be valid when they are based on data from the jurisdictions in which the studies are to be conducted. In this method note, we provide software code, in the form of a SAS macro, for producing statistical…

An experiment compared the impact of more and less semantically connected sentence contexts on vocabulary learning. Third graders (N = 40) were taught the definitions and meanings of six unfamiliar verbs: "anticipate," "attain," "devise," "restrain," "wield," and "persist." The verbs were…

Several previous researches showed that students had difficulty in understanding the basic concept of multiplication. Students are more likely to be introduced by using formula without involving the concept itself. This underlies the researcher to design a learning trajectory of learning multiplication using Permainan Tradisional Tepuk Bergambar…

Two experiments aim at describing the impact of friendship during a synchronous collaborative information retrieval (SCIR) with young pupils (recruited in Grade 3). In the first study, 68 pupils were asked to look for 13 answers in one of the three following conditions: on an individual basis (condition "Single"), as part of a designed duo with…

Learning the concept of perimeter and area is not easy for students in grade 3 of primary school. A common mistake is that students think that if the area is the same, the perimeter also has to be the same. It is difficult for them to understand that for a given area, there are many possibilities of perimeter and vice versa. When student are not…

Background: Cluster-randomized experiments that assign intact groups such as schools or school districts to treatment conditions are increasingly common in educational research. Such experiments are inherently multilevel designs whose sensitivity (statistical power and precision of estimates) depends on the variance decomposition across levels.…

Providing exploratory activities prior to explicit instruction can facilitate learning. However, the level of guidance provided during the exploration has largely gone unstudied. In this study, we examined the effects of 1 form of guidance, feedback, during exploratory mathematics problem solving for children with varying levels of prior domain…

The goal of this study is to develop a virtual farm for educational applications. Users can play the role of a farmer by planting vegetables and raising poultry on the virtual farm to observe their growth through online learning activities. The virtual farm possesses educational and entertaining functions, and it is designed by simulating the real…

This project was designed to test Mayer's multimedia theory in an elementary school to improve students' mathematics learning for low-income children. The study designed and developed two multimedia mathematics experiments in 3rd grade: 9's multiplication experiment and geometric solids experiment. The two experimental lessons were implemented in…

In recent years, propensity score matching (PSM) has gained attention as a potential method for estimating the impact of public policy programs in the absence of experimental evaluations. In this study, we evaluate the usefulness of PSM for estimating the impact of a program change in an educational context (Tennessee's Student Teacher Achievement…

The authors conducted an experiment during the 2003-2004 school year to determine whether "On Our Way to English" ("OWE"), a product to help elementary students learn to read and speak English, was more effective in a California and a Texas school district than materials already in place. In the California study, 384 English…