Hannah is a Pacific island grade 1 teacher in a local village school. She has established a 90-minute daily literacy block in which she focuses on literacy-related activities. During these blocks, she notices many of her students having difficulty reading words she thinks they should know by sight. She wants to help her students learn frequently…

In a 3-year longitudinal, mixed-method study, 67 children in two schools were observed during literacy activities in Grades 1-3. Children and their teachers were interviewed each year about the children's motivation to read and write. Taking a grounded theory approach, content analysis of the child interview protocols identified the motivations…

Asian American parents' involvement practices challenge the traditional definition of parent involvement (participation in school activities). In this paper, I argue that research and practices focusing only on this narrow definition of parent involvement may not be culturally sensitive approaches to supporting the home-school connection. The…

Although Chinese has become the third largest mother tongue in both Canada and the USA, Chinese/English biliteracy development has received little attention in educational research. This article explores three Chinese-Canadian first and second graders' biliteracy (Chinese/English reading and writing) and trilingual (Mandarin, Cantonese, and…

Background: Learning conceptions may be studied as specific implicit theories based on theory of mind. Previous studies suggest that a developmental shift from a direct implicit theory of learning to an interpretative one occurs during childhood. Here we explore the development of children's autobiographies of learning to write by adopting this…

The current investigation was designed to examine the provision of cognitive stimulation to preschool-aged children from high-risk families. Participants were drawn from the Concordia Longitudinal Risk Project, a prospective, longitudinal investigation of individuals recruited in 1976-77 from lower SES neighbourhoods who were rated by childhood…

The purpose of this action research project report was to increase reading comprehension by using cooperative learning. Reading comprehension was a concern for the three teacher researchers at both research sites. There were 51 first and second grade students, 28 elementary teachers, and 51 families of the first and second grade students involved…

This study examined ways in which children's risk of school failure may be moderated by support from teachers. Participants were 910 children in a national prospective study. Children were identified as at risk at ages 5-6 years on the basis of demographic characteristics and the display of multiple functional (behavioral, attention, academic,…

Using an ecological model, this study explored the effects of distal and proximal sources of influence on students' learning. We first examined three markers of teacher qualification--elementary education credential, years of education, and years of experience--on observed classroom practices across three dimensions--warmth/responsivity,…

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) has regularly assessed the reading skills of U.S. fourth-graders since the early 1970s, but few national studies have assessed the reading skills of children when they enter kindergarten and then documented the development of these skills through fifth grade. This analysis uses data from the…

Substantial uncertainty exists about the impact of school quality on the black-white achievement gap. Our results, based on both Texas Schools Project (TSP) administrative data and the Early Childhood Longitudinal Survey (ECLS), differ noticeably from other recent analyses of the black-white achievement gap by providing strong evidence that…

In our graduate programs in early childhood education, we model constructivist practice in the belief that teachers are better able to understand and implement constructivist principles having experienced them in their work. In this practice we attempt to be explicit about constructivist practice in our program and in elementary classrooms. As we…

There are now in the United States nine thousand kindergartens, in which more than four hundred thousand children, mostly between the ages of 4 and 6, are taught according to the methods of the Froebel kindergarten, more or less modified to correspond to accepted principles of education and to American life and American forms of school…

The central question addressed in this study was: What factors are associated with individual differences in academic motivation among first-grade students who were born to low-income adolescent mothers? Data from a 7-year longitudinal study were used to address the question. First-grade teachers assessed academic motivation for 89 children at the…

What kind of developmental potential is present in elementary schoolchildren but hindered by the traditional type of education? Half a century ago Daniel El'konin and Vasili Davydov, the leaders of Russian Vygotskian educational psychology started answering this question. They suggested that reflection is a basic human ability and it can be…