Lauren Hennig is a relatively new third grade teacher in Charleston, Illinois. She knows that patiently listening to others and respectfully sharing one's own opinion is a learned skill that's essential for promoting and sustaining our democracy. This is the story of how Lauren works to help her students develop this skill through student-led…

This study explored the lived experiences of three third grade emergent bilinguals learning English literacies such as speaking, reading, and writing in school using a post-intentional phenomenological approach (Vagle, 2014). Learning what is unfamiliar, especially academics can be challenging for emergent bilinguals. Young elementary children are…

Different schools apply different educational approaches, and different learning concepts interpret knowledge in different ways. The two dominant perspectives classify learning as the acquisition of knowledge, or as participation in school practices. In order to support teachers in choosing the educational method that best fits their teaching…

This study examines third, fourth, and fifth grade students' reasoning that was captured as they engaged collaboratively in a teacher designed inquiry task. This task focused on choosing eco-friendly toys for a fictitious local toy store. Results indicated that students were more expressive with reasoning when they shared their ideas orally, but…

Elementary teachers face the challenging task of meeting state curriculum standards while at the same time attempting to expand ideas that are inclusive of the wider world. True inquiry is "experienced when those involved [do] not know the answers that lay at the end of their exploration". Guiding children into true inquiry is difficult…

Research on young children's reasoning show the complex relationships of knowledge, theories, and evidence in their decision-making and problem solving. Most of the research on children's reasoning skills has been done in individualized and formal research settings, not collective classroom environments where children often engage in learning and…

In the classroom experiences described in this article, grade three students were introduced to storytelling through the interactive read aloud of a mentor text and a storytelling demonstration, followed by daily collaborative activities involving listening, speaking, reading, and writing, culminating in dramatic storytelling performances. The…

The purpose of this study is to investigate the effects of laboratory approach based on jigsaw method with cooperative learning and confirmatory laboratory approach on university students' cognitive process development in Science teaching laboratory applications, and to determine the opinions of the students on applied laboratory methods. The…

Part of the Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education (SCOPE) research series titled "Teachers' Time: Collaborating for Learning, Teaching, and Leading," this case study looks at Pagosa Springs Elementary School, which is located in the Town of Pagosa Springs, Colorado. The school serves students in kindergarten through fourth…

Pedagogical shifts favouring collaborative learning and findings of recent studies have raised concerns regarding the claim that gifted students prefer to learn alone. The purpose of this study was to further investigate if, when and how high ability learners want to work with or without others. The distributions of 416 high ability students (n =…

This article reports on 2 experiments in inner-city Baltimore evaluating a computer-assisted tutoring approach, Tutoring With Alphie (TWA), in which 1 paraprofessional can work with up to 6 children at a time. In Study 1, we randomly assigned 14 schools to receive TWA or to continue with whatever approaches they were currently using. Each…

Evaluating promisingness of ideas is an important but underdeveloped aspect of knowledge building. The goal of this research was to examine the extent to which Grade 3 students could make promisingness judgments to facilitate knowledge-building discourse. A Promising Ideas Tool was added to Knowledge Forum software to better support…

This paper reports a novel, mobile-assisted, game-based learning design for Chinese character learning. In playing the "Chinese-PP" game in a 1:1 (one-device-per-student) setting, each of the 31 target students in Primary 3 (9 years old) is assigned a Chinese character component. A student may make use of his/her own and peers' character…

Part of the Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education (SCOPE) research series titled "Teachers' Time: Collaborating for Learning, Teaching, and Leading," this case study looks at the Santa Monica Alternative School House (SMASH), a K-8 public school in the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District (SMMUSD). It is a school of…

This study attempts to document the efficacy of peer-support and self-monitoring during partnered reading by third grade students as evidenced by their discourse. Pairs of third grade students engaged in partnered reading in a general education third grade classroom. Their oral reading, coaching and conversations were recorded using i-Pod2s over…