The COVID-19 pandemic and the move by governments worldwide to cancel in-class instruction and move to emergency remote instruction in March and April of 2020 created an unprecedented disruption in children's education. As the COVID-19 pandemic took form and continued to impact education in the following 2020/2021 academic year, multiple concerns…

There is a strong body of research showing associations between handwriting automaticity and children's writing performance. However, less is known about keyboarding automaticity and young students' writing performance. We investigated the relationship between handwriting and keyboarding automaticity and writing performance in both modalities in a…

The utility of homework and its impact on academic achievement has been an ongoing debate for more than 100 years. To date, there is no rigorous experimental research to show whether, and the extent to which, variations in the amount of homework assigned can impact the academic performance of elementary school students. In this study, 440…

This study examines the impact of Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) lessons on elementary students and their writing competency. Over the course of one school year, second grade students in a public school in New Jersey were exposed to the VTS protocol as established by Abigail Housen in her Theory of Aesthetic Development. These students' pre and…

The following study was developed to investigate the development of writing skills in second and third grade students. The recent emphasis on writing, specifically writing in multiple genres, made in the Common Core State Standards (CCSS, 2010) has increased the need to further understand how students write. The NAEP (2002) reports that…

Literacy activities in which children invest in and understand literacy creates spaces for them to construct their identity as readers/writers and build their personal theories of literacy. This study presents the identity construction of second grade students who identified as successful, average or struggling in their first time engagement with…

Nine 2nd-grade students who struggled with writing learned the Ask, Reflect, Text (ART) strategy to help them better address the content that should be included in narrative stories. After asking the questions that address what should be included in their text, students used art media as they reflected to illustrate their answers. They used this…

Evidence was collected regarding changes over 3 years in the quality of a preprimary program in rural Bangladesh and differences in school achievement of children who did and did not attend. The quality of 30 preprimary schools was evaluated using the ECERS-R (Early Childhood Environment Rating Scale-Revised) and ECERS-E (-Extension). Results…

The use of multimedia graphic organizer software and how it influenced the prewriting process for primary school children were evaluated. An analysis of writing samples generated by second-grade students with diverse writing abilities was carried out. Students were given two opportunities to participate in prewriting activities--one without and…