The goals of this formative experiment were threefold: (a) to teach the story/visual elements and characteristics of picturebooks to pre-service teachers (PSTs) from the classroom teacher education department and to help them use these elements with elementary school students, (b) to enable the PSTs to create original self-published picturebooks…

Educational policies and initiatives significantly influence instruction in classrooms across the nation. This article presents data from a larger critical ethnographic study in an urban school in the United States during the school's first year implementing the Common Core State Standards. In this article, the author shares data from three…

This paper considers whether the sources of linguistic complexity presented within texts targeted at 1st-grade readers have increased, decreased, or held steady over the 52-year period from 1962 to 2013. A collection of more than 450 texts is examined. All texts were selected from Grade 1 textbooks published by Scott Foresman during the targeted…

We use data from one of the few states where information on curriculum adoptions is available--Indiana--to empirically evaluate differences in performance across three elementary-mathematics curricula. The three curricula that we evaluate were popular nationally during the time of our study, and two of the three remain popular today. We find large…

In this study we analyzed the use of children's literature in three widely used commercially published and literature-based reading programs for grades 1 to 6. On average, 37% of the literature selections had been previously published, with a range by publisher of 4% to 55%. These percentages are noticeably lower than those reported for American…