Political and societal pressures are influencing kindergarten teachers and their classroom practices on a national level. Teachers' receptivity to reforms depends to a large degree on their buy-in to the change effort. Drawing on analyses of interviews with kindergarten teachers across school and districts, this study examined teacher buy-in to an…

Early childhood educators are concerned about a "shovedown" of elementary school expectations, standards, and curriculum on to young children due to policy-makers' moves towards utilising preschool programmes to address disparities in academic achievement. This study employs interviews and classroom observations to contrast the…

This study examines how, if at all, multiple subjects and administrative services credential preparation programs are changing in response to California's newest grade, Transitional Kindergarten (TK). We analyzed interviews from university faculty in early childhood education and credential programs in five institutions of higher education and…

The purpose of this qualitative case study was to gain a better understanding of how induction programs might effectively support STEM K-8 teacher preparation. American schools are not producing competent STEM graduates prepared to meet employment demands. Over the next decade, STEM employment opportunities are expected to increase twice as fast…

The goal of this research is to examine how implementing a new pedagogical structure, Academic Choice, informs my understanding of my students as learners and individuals. Using a self-study methodology over the course of eight working sessions in my Kindergarten classroom, I collected multiple forms of qualitative data, including student work…

While the United States' National Research Council (NRC 2012) and Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS 2013) advocate children's engagement in active science learning, elementary school teachers in the US indicate lack of time to teach science regularly because of (1) school and district pressure to focus on English language arts and…

In this article, the author explores the phenomenon of children's language choice and language use in a Korean-English two-way immersion (TWI) program. She does so by drawing on situations in which the children spoke of the principles guiding their choice of languages, and instances in which they voluntarily adopted Korean as the means of…

Over the years the amount of homework and what kind of homework students are completing on a nightly basis has changed dramatically. From the early 1900s when homework was abolished because it was considered a violation of child labor laws to today when after No Child Left Behind was enacted in 2002, the focus has moved to evaluating academic…

These proceedings contain the papers of the 13th International Conference on Cognition and Exploratory Learning in the Digital Age (CELDA 2016), October 28-30, 2016, which has been organized by the International Association for Development of the Information Society (IADIS), co-organized by the University of Mannheim, Germany, and endorsed by the…