Standards-based grading has been used in many Illinois public elementary schools for years, offering educators a different way of assessing and communicating to parents about their student achievement and performance on the grade level state standards. Educators faced many benefits and challenges using a standards-based grading system identified.…

This dissertation explores the mathematics identities of early elementary school students. Throughout school, many students come to believe that mathematics is not for them or is not a part of who they are or want to be. Previous research has revealed mechanisms that lead to negative relationships with mathematics for middle grade students and…

Social and emotional learning (SEL) is a critical developmental process where children acquire and develop the skills, knowledge, and attitudes necessary to manage emotions, develop and maintain relationships, and make appropriate decisions. The purpose of this evaluation was to examine how the Emotional ABCs Program increased students'…

The purpose of this article is to promote a deeper, more complex understanding of the challenge that "recess time" poses to elementary school educators and to thereby understand the practices in which they are currently engaging. Because teachers are expected to shepherd students through a vast array of learning standards while remaining…

The Teacher-Child Interaction Training-Universal (TCIT-U) is a professional development program for teachers that promotes positive relational interactions and strengthens classroom management. This study examines the implementation of TCIT-U in a public school district to guide future implementation and sustainability. This study uses qualitative…

The purpose of this explanatory mixed method study was to assess teachers' perceptions of whole brain learning (WBL) and its effects on student success within eight southern Illinois school districts in rural and suburban areas in kindergarten through fourth grade. Quantitative data were collected from survey questions in SurveyMonkey, providing…

This research examined how parents' math anxiety is associated with their controlling and autonomy-supportive involvement in children's math learning; the contribution of such involvement to children's math achievement was also evaluated. Parents (N = 562; 62% White, 21% Black; 65% with at least a bachelor's degree) of young elementary school…

As schools strive to instill college and career readiness within students, the academic success of students continues to be a priority of educators and administrators alike. The classroom learning environment utilized by students was examined throughout this study. Specifically, this study examined how the spaces within the classroom are utilized…

This article describes second-grade emergent bilinguals' dialogue in culture circles. I share how the tenets of humanizing pedagogy were manifested as my students and I engaged in critical pedagogy around issues of power and privilege related to bilingualism, biliteracy, and biculturalism. Together we sought mutual humanization through the…

This study was designed to fill the gap in knowledge due to the little research that has been conducted on the impacts of blended learning in regards to student achievement. The purpose of the study was to examine the difference in achievement scores for students in the second-grade participating in a rotation model of blended learning as compared…

The present longitudinal study tested the roles of early childhood executive control (EC) as well as exposure to poverty-related adversity at family and school levels as key predictors of low-income children's EC in elementary school ("n" = 391). Findings suggest that children's EC difficulties in preschool and lower family income from…

Few Spanish language tools are available for assessing important social-emotional learning (SEL) skills. The present study presents evidence of the psychometric properties of a Spanish-language version of SELweb (SELweb-S), a web-based system for assessing children's ability to recognize others' emotions and perspectives, solve social problems,…

This article presents an engaging means for turning disfluent readers into prosody superstars. Each week students align with Poetry Power Man and his superhero friends to battle the evil Robot Reader and his sidekicks. The Fluency Foursome helps students adhere to the multidimensional aspects of fluency where expression and comprehension are…

In the fall of 2010 the faculty of Baker Demonstration School began a yearlong exploration of the question "How do we know what children know?" At that time, three teacher colleagues already had entered upon a collaborative project integrating music and drama with a unit of study in the second and third grades. They decided to carefully…

In this article Megan Mathisen, a teacher of deaf and hard of hearing children at St. Anne Grade School in St. Anne, Illinois, describes her work with two boys in second grade and one boy in fifth grade who at the beginning of the school year had reading and language delays. After working with them, her second grade boys are now on grade level and…