The purpose of this sociolinguistic study is to examine language beliefs, emotions, and practices of twenty bi/multilingual fourth-grade children of immigrants in monolingual U.S. schools in relation to societal language ideologies. This qualitative multiple case study included individual semi-structured interviews with bi/multilingual children…

Education is seen as a resource at a global level but is currently considered to be in crisis in many parts of the world. This constitutes a significant drawback in terms of humanity's prosperity and well-being since education is the key not only to an educated workforce but also to humane, collaborative, and caring societies. Even within this dim…

Background: Outdoor education may positively impact the educational, physical, and emotional development of youth, but studies are sparse among urban children. Purpose: To investigate 1) physical activity (PA) levels in outdoor versus indoor education environments, 2) science learning gains during outdoor education, and 3) programmatic…

Research has focused on students' difficulties understanding phenomena in which agency is distributed across actors whose individual-level behaviors converge to result in collective outcomes. Building on Levy and Wilensky (2008), this study identified features of distributed causality students understand and that may offer affordances for…

In spring 2020, COVID-19 seismically shifted the education landscape as schooling moved online. We report a small-scale mixed-methods study of how that upheaval affected three-dimensional science learning in elementary school classrooms, and how the situation changed when school resumed, in modified form, in fall 2020. Teachers with experience in…

In this brief article, Christina Kuriacose provides four sample performance assessments. Spanning grade levels, these assessments are strong examples of teacher-developed performance assessments from schools within the Center for Collaborative Education's Quality Performance Assessment network. These performance tasks demonstrate the pedagogical…

Schools in the United States have historically conducted language policing in favor of standardized American English. The current study examines links between language policies in eight immigrant families in relation to educational language policies of two public elementary schools operating under an English-only policy in Massachusetts. The study…

Purpose: We examined the association between language experience and elementary students' eligibility for special education in Massachusetts. Method: A secondary descriptive data analysis was conducted on the anonymized demographic data obtained from the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education. Third, 4th, and 5th grade…

Outdoor education programs have been shown to have a positive effect on the educational, physical and emotional development of youth. They are increasingly being used to foster a sense of community in schools and to provide students with learning opportunities related to the environment. This article describes an integrated outdoor education…

This mixed-methods study examines how teachers who have taught one or two units of the Engineering is Elementary (EiE) curriculum for two years reported on: students' responses to design failure; the ways in which they, the teachers, supported these students and used fail words (e.g. fail, failure); and the teachers' broad perspectives and…

Screening and monitoring student reading progress can be costly and time consuming. Assessment embedded within the context of online instructional programs can capture ongoing student performance data while limiting testing time outside of instruction. This paper presents two studies that examined the validity of using performance measures from a…

It has long been argued that U.S. states' differential performance on nationwide assessments may reflect differences in students' opportunity to learn the tested content that is primarily due to variation in curricular content standards, rather than in instructional quality or educational investment. To quantify the effect of differences in…

Schools need evidence-based guidance on which measures in mathematics, administered under what particular set of conditions (e.g., time of year), provide the most useful prediction. The purpose of this study was to examine decision accuracy among commonly used screening measures with a priority toward identifying the least costly screening…

Novel Engineering activities are premised on the integration of engineering and literacy: students identify and engineer solutions to problems that arise for fictional characters in stories they read for class. There are advantages to this integration, for both engineering and literacy goals of instruction: the stories provide ''clients'' to…

In this work we examined the content of approximately 950 mathematics questions used in measuring achievement among 4th, 5th and 6th graders in the US in an attempt to determine how the current standardized examinations, which were developed to reflect new national curricular mandates, compared to the old measures used for the same purpose. Using…