Primary teachers often struggle to find high quality literature for use with their first-grade students. Therefore, a list of award winning books was evaluated for characteristics that lend themselves to teaching reading comprehension strategies and literary elements. The Golden Kite Award, an annual award which provides a grant to the winning…

Turkey's Ministry of National Education aims to identify and develop valuable characteristics to prepare the nation's young for their professional life as adults. The Ministry has been conducting an extensive and comprehensive review of the educational system since the beginning of 2000. Educational system was implemented in time for the 2012/2013…

We report on a design based research study exploring how the organization of classroom activity impacts early elementary students' critical criteria for evaluating representations in science class. The ability to critique representations produced by others as well as one's own is an important practice when working with representations. Effective…

Children of all ages love painting to music. Aside from discovering the natural correlation between music and art, the author's students learned about Mozart's life and work in music class. In this article, students discover the influence that music can have on their art. (Contains 1 online resource.)

The provision for allowing local education agencies to use an assessment of a student's response to intervention (RTI) in lieu of a consideration of an ability--achievement discrepancy has been a controversial aspect of the 2004 Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act. To address issues that have arisen about RTI, a series of…

A recent report by Dr. Randall Ryder evaluated the use of Direct Instruction (DI) reading programs in 2 school districts in Wisconsin. In the report, Ryder claimed that students in 1st, 2nd, and 3rd grade who received Direct Instruction scored significantly lower on several standardized tests of reading than students who received more traditional…