Blackstone Valley Prep, a K-12 charter school network, admits students from across four racially and socioeconomically diverse communities in the northeast corner of Rhode Island. The network integrates students within classrooms, regardless of performance level. Its culturally responsive curriculum aims to reflect and incorporate the range of…

Teaching practicum experiences, including those in international contexts, are based on partnerships between institutions and host schools, and the partnership between the pre-service teacher, the cooperating teacher and the university supervisor. This article explores the relationship between pre-service teachers and cooperating teachers in an…

The vitality of the innovation economy in the United States depends on the availability of a highly educated technical workforce. A key component of this workforce consists of engineers, engineering technicians, and engineering technologists. However, unlike the much better-known field of engineering, engineering technology (ET) is unfamiliar to…

Currently, the place of play in schooling and education is controversial. Even in pre-school, where play is most likely to be found, its status is often precarious. This article notes that in many ancient religious traditions, play is sometimes viewed as sinful, whereas work, its antithesis, is seen as virtuous. The German educationist, Friedrich…

Has the gap in average standardized test scores between students from high- and low-income families widened, narrowed, or remained stable over the last 3 decades? The question is important both because the achievement gap is measure of how (un)equally educational opportunities are distributed in the US, and because the disparity in educational…

This paper reviews the development of early childhood education and care (ECEC) in China. The historical context from 1900 is summarised, and then developments from the 1980s up to the present kindergarten expansion movement, starting in 2010, are covered in detail. The review shows that ECEC development in China has undergone great changes both…

Increasingly, the imperative for improving educational quality in schooling systems throughout the developing world is harnessed to a particular set of teaching and learning practices, such as child-centred, child-friendly or learner-centred pedagogy (LCP). Such was the case in Timor-Leste where, after independence, LCP was heavily promoted as a…

The purpose of the study was to address possible text complexity shifts across the past six decades for a continually best-selling first-grade core reading program. The anthologies of one publisher's seven first-grade core reading programs were examined using computer-based analytics, dating from 1962 to 2013. Variables were Overall Text…

This research investigated the cognitive demands of reading curricula from 1910 to 2000. We considered both the nature of the text used and the comprehension tasks asked of students in determining the cognitive demands of the curricula. Contrary to the common assumption of a trend of simplification of the texts and comprehension tasks in third-…

Games have played an important role in modern educational methodologies. Beginning with the work of luminaries like Froebel, Montessori, and Dewey and continuing through the Cold War, the counter-culture movement of the 1960s and '70s, and into the present day, shifts in educational practice can be traced historically using the lens of games,…

This paper advances the theoretical and applied connection between education policy and community development. We call this community-aware education policy, and it is based on Dean's (2012) conception of human need that is thick (i.e., accounts for a relational context), rather than relying solely on a thin conception (i.e., instrumental view…

Recent accounts suggest that accountability pressures have trickled down into the early elementary grades and that kindergarten today is characterized by a heightened focus on academic skills and a reduction in opportunities for play. This paper compares public school kindergarten classrooms between 1998 and 2010 using two large, nationally…

Hon C. W. W Kannanagara is truly the father of Free Education in Sri Lanka who had a vision of providing free education to all at all levels from primary to tertiary in 1944, whereas it was only in 1990, after Jometien EFA conference, the world development organization advocated at least primary education must be free for all. After 70 years of…

This article explains early childhood inclusion in Croatia from its beginnings up to challenges in current policy and practice. The first preschool education for children with disabilities dates back to the 1980s and was provided in special institutions. In the last 10 years, mainstream kindergartens have been enrolling children with disabilities…

This systematic review of research on early childhood programs seeks to identify effective approaches capable of improving literacy and language outcomes for preschoolers. It applies consistent standards to determine the strength of evidence supporting a variety of approaches, which fell into two main categories: "comprehensive…