This study aims to analyze and compare school subjects to determine the extent to which critical thinking skills are being engaged in school subjects' questions and activities in public education. Five Arab countries are included in this paper; Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, The Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, Arab Republic of Egypt, and The Tunisian…

Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, young children did not attend school in the traditional setting. However, many teachers, schools, and districts conducted online instruction to allow students to still learn despite the restrictions. After two years, teachers and students returned to the classrooms and schools. However, the time away from school…

The quality of teacher-pupil interactions is important for pupils' learning and engagement, and teachers play an important role in facilitating learning. Tablets are often used in primary education. This study evaluated the quality of teacher-pupil interactions during first-grade lessons, with and without tablets, during a typical school day…

The connection between school success and the quality of the student-teacher relationship (STR) is especially salient for students with or at-risk for emotional and behavioral disorders (EBD; Zolkoski, 2019). However, the STR is typically poor for these students (Breeman et al., 2018; Crum et al., 2016) and little work has been done to understand…

The "Next Generation Science Standards" call for engaging students in practices that scientists and engineers use (NGSS Lead States 2013), but it's also important to explicitly teach thinking approaches that scientists and engineers use. One way to help children think and act like scientists and engineers is to engage them with…

Despite the importance placed on reading in the classroom, an unacceptable number of students lack the literacy skills essential to succeed in today's knowledge-based economy, putting them at greater risk of persistent unemployment and other forms of economic hardship. The problem is that public charter elementary (K-4) school intervention…

First-grade mathematics curriculum has been typically constructed to emphasize the development of whole number and operations. Topics addressed to a lesser extent include algebraic thinking, measurement, and geometry. In this research study, we suggest an alternative to this balance of topics. We compared prior research and learning expectations…

Understanding how to intensify an intervention is critical to implementing response-to-intervention (RtI), a tiered, problem-solving framework to deliver evidence-based interventions per student needs. Research and practice guidelines provide conflicting recommendations for delivering math interventions (i.e., treatment intensity) within RtI. The…

Research showed that the capacity of making simple estimations begins to develop already at the age of five, but little is known about the early development of this estimation capacity and the strategies that underly it. The current study longitudinally followed the estimation capacity and strategies of 332 children from first to second grade of…

As an introduction to sound and vibration, the authors wanted their first-grade students to plan and conduct their own investigations. In this article, the authors share a series of investigations to help students explore the relationship between sound and vibration. By planning, creating, testing, adapting, and reflecting on the outcomes of the…

Cognitive interviews play an important role in articulating the intended construct of educational assessments. This paper describes the iterative development of protocols for cognitive interviews with kindergarten through second-grade children to understand how their spatial reasoning skill development aligns with intended constructs. We describe…

The purpose of this mixed methods study was to determine the effects of a tutorial program on first-grade children's reading skills and their tutors' (also preservice teachers) knowledge of reading instruction. Participants consisted of a group of 30 first-grade children served in the program and a control group of 30 children. Literacy…

Beginning in the 1950s, learning to read was a major focus in elementary schools. Children typically began their reading journey with listening skills. Hearing sounds for letters, then words, come to life from the pages of a book were engaging to children. One way teachers engaged students in learning to read was to read aloud to them in their…

This study investigated the perspectives of grade one and two teachers on the essential lesson preparation made and its usefulness in the teaching and learning process. Descriptive or transcendental phenomenology using semi-structured interviews collected data from 43 (18 first grade and 25-second grade) teachers sampled randomly among…

We examined the role of morphological processing in the reading of inflections and derivations in Arabic, a morphologically-rich language, among 228 first-graders and 230 second-graders. All words were morphologically complex, with differences in number of morphemes and morphological transparency. Inflections consisted of three morphemes, with…