Students' socioemotional skills must be well developed and should be considered as a crucial component of education. Learning that occurs in an environment that enhances social context and develops socioemotional skills is an ideal environment to ensure readiness to succeed beyond the classroom walls. Multiage classrooms may prove to be a robust…

Educators' self-efficacy influences their practice and thus determines the quality of teaching in early childhood education and care (ECEC). This study analyzed educators' self-efficacy to teach physical education (PE) and the differences between pre-service and in-service early childhood educators. Early childhood educators (N = 381) completed a…

English Language Learners, such as my Hutterian students, struggle to overcome a variety of learning barriers. I examined a variety of instructional methods to determine what would help them. The first aspect I explored was how English Language Learners acquire literacy skills. I also investigated how to expand my students' background knowledge.…

We estimate the effects of relative age in kindergarten using data from an experiment where children of the same age were randomly assigned to different kindergarten classmates. We exploit the resulting experimental variation in relative age in conjunction with variation in expected kindergarten entry age based on birth date to account for…

Multi-age classrooms feature the intentional grouping of students from consecutive grade levels for the purpose of fostering a nurturing classroom atmosphere. While an abundance of research on multi-age education has been produced throughout the past 50 years, only recent efforts have seen researchers turn their attention to the experiences of art…

Hungary has experienced significant political, economic, demographic and social changes since the end of Soviet domination in the 1990s. The gradual move towards liberal democracy has been accompanied by growing emphasis on individualism, choice and diversity. Universal kindergarten provision for five- to six-year-olds is a long established…

Literate practice in the arts encompasses both aesthetics and creativity. It is also multimodal in nature and often collaborative. This article presents data collected from a small multi-age school, with children from Prep to Year 7, during their preparation for an end-of-year show. The children had studied the topics of conservation and…

The California class size reduction program provided schools with cash rewards for K-3 classes of 20 or fewer students. I show how program rules made it possible for schools to save money by using mixed-grade classes to meet class size reduction obligations while maintaining larger average class sizes. I also show that this smoothing of students…