For the last few decades there has been an increased growth for practice in Educational Drama in China. This pedagogical approach has caught the attention of Chinese language arts educators, who teach Chinese as a first language. Recent research points to how these Chinese language arts educators recognize drama as a positive and effective medium…

The purpose of the present study was to determine the effect of creative writing exercises on narrative text writing skills and advanced reading awareness. To do that one of the mixed research designs, "exploratory sequential design" was used. The quantitative part of the study, in which a pretest post-test research design was used,…

Although flipped classroom is a relatively new method in children's education, it is quickly gaining importance because it creates time for more active learning and develops learning practices by integrating technology. This study examined the perceptions of fifty-seven middle school teachers regarding flipped classroom. The teachers' survey…

Despite increases in the high school graduation rate in the United States, large disparities persist for English learners (ELs). These disparities are particularly important given that ELs are the fastest growing segment of the United States public school population. EL youth, though, are not a homogeneous population. Instead, EL youth speak many…

Summer learning loss (SLL) is a familiar and much-studied phenomenon, yet new concerns that measurement artifacts may have distorted canonical SLL findings create a need to revisit basic research on SLL. Though race/ethnicity and socioeconomic status only account for about 4% of the variance in SLL, nearly all prior work focuses on these factors.…

After watching his fifth-grade son perform in "The Taming of the Shrew," Ben Lathrop realized that having learned the play through performance, his son found the experience enjoyable. Moreover, his acting decisions (movements, gestures, vocal inflections) demonstrated that he had at least some understanding of his lines, suggesting that…

Whether intellectually gifted children have a greater emotional response when tested is still unclear. This may be due to the marked heterogeneity of this particular population, and the fact that most studies lack the power to reduce the noise associated with this heterogeneity. The present study examined the relationship between performance and…

In this article, I describe the challenges students faced in interpreting literary--or fictional--texts in the National Monitoring Study of Student Achievement in the English learning area. I explain why it is important for students to learn how to interpret literary texts at school and consider why they might struggle with this important skill. I…

We seek to build a framework with which researchers can track the trends in charter school specialization and parents can better understand their options. This report examines the entire charter school population operating in the 2018-19 school year and calculates the rate of specialization among charter schools based on key terms found on their…

Successful implementation of the current English Language Arts (ELA) curriculum invites a new approach to teacher professional learning (PL). A focus on establishing and renewing relationships must play a role in developing the collaboration necessary for curriculum implementation. This article presents a research-based argument that effective and…

This article provides an in-depth examination of differentiation, instructional strategies that cater to all learners. Differentiation is beneficial when teachers can select content, process, and products that meet student's needs. While teachers incorporate differentiation to modify instruction with struggling students, gifted and talented…

Recently, false accusations of Critical Race Theory (CRT) being taught in elementary and secondary schools have emerged in response to culturally relevant, sustaining, and revitalizing curricula; this pushback makes it difficult for many educators to safely employ culturally relevant literature in their classrooms. This article confronts the…

Racial and economic segregation continues throughout the US due to multiple factors (Rothstein, 2017), and inequality in school infrastructure spendings has been related to racial and economic segregation (Sosina & Weathers, 2019). While the obvious solution is to desegregate neighborhoods, society's inability to do this leads to a dire need…

Background: When exposed to evaluative situations, up to 40% of students develop test anxiety, reflected, namely, by extensive worry, intrusive thoughts, and physiological arousal. Though the negative influence of test anxiety on later school performance is well documented, the role of students' initial achievement in the development of later test…

In this article, I note an observable social turn in languages arts curricula in Latin America. However, I argue that the effort to contextualize written language and bring everyday uses of writing into the classroom falls short of promoting a critical understanding of some key aspects of how literacies work. To do this, I analyze a recent…