Kim and Roth (this issue) purport to draw on the social-psychological theory of L. S. Vygotsky in order to investigate social relations in children's argumentation in science topics. The authors argue that the argumentation framework offered by Stephen Toulmin is limited in addressing social relations. The authors thus criticize Toulmin's Argument…

The interaction analysis presented by Kim and Roth examines nine students, their teachers, the learning task and materials in a mixed second and third grade science classroom during the school day. In the research narrative readers are introduced to two resourceful and creative groups of students as they work on a task assigned by their…

Reading by third grade is a hot topic. Dozens of state legislatures have passed laws aimed at improving early reading, many of them mandating retention if the job is not done by the end of grade 3. Everyone from philanthropists to publishers, from parents to the press, have fixed on it. And setting aside too many people's assumptions to the…

In this commentary, the author reflects on four studies that have greatly expanded the knowledge base on effective interventions in mathematics, and he provides four rigorous experimental studies of approaches for students likely to experience difficulties learning mathematics over a large grade-level span (pre-K to 4th grade). All of the…

A recent NBER [National Bureau of Economic Research] working paper examines Florida's policy to retain many low-scoring third graders. The report concludes that third-grade retention has immediate positive effects on the following year's test results, but these effects fade over the next six years, with no effect on graduation. The regression…

In the fall of 2010 the faculty of Baker Demonstration School began a yearlong exploration of the question "How do we know what children know?" At that time, three teacher colleagues already had entered upon a collaborative project integrating music and drama with a unit of study in the second and third grades. They decided to carefully…

Over the past few decades, reading assessment has been pushed to the forefront of the national discussion about education. The most recent reauthorizations of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (1994, 2001) made assessment a priority as administrators and teachers are attempting to meet increasing accountability standards, but measuring…

Teaching upper elementary school students is a joy because they are still enthusiastic about learning and will contribute energy and invest themselves completely in worthwhile projects; will engage in higher-level challenges; work with a greater sense of future purpose; and can develop enduring habits of mind and habits of character. In this…

In this commentary, the authors bring insights from their work on science-literacy integration at the elementary level to bear on the ongoing conversation about disciplinary literacy at the middle and secondary levels. In particular, the authors discuss what they have learned about inquiry, disciplinary reading strategies, and the role of text in…

Every year, newspaper articles and news releases from education departments around the nation report that test scores are up again, often dramatically. The main story line is usually positive: performance is getting better, and rapidly. Unfortunately, this good news is often more apparent than real. Scores on the tests used for accountability have…

In all the elementary schools in the county, benchmark assessments were given six times a year in math and three times in reading; they were modeled after the questions anticipated on the Maryland School Assessment (MSA). Although results were sent to the school board, there were no cosmic consequences for the hourlong tests; they were supposed to…

The eight contributions to this special issue provide an informative focus on many aspects of peer-based victimization in schools. Often using sophisticated quantitative and analytic procedures, they advance our knowledge in several important domains, pointing out important contextual variables, interactions, and mediating factors in the negative…

The notion of assumptions permeates school mathematics, but instruction tends to highlight this notion only in the advanced grades. In this article, I argue that it is important for even young children to develop a sense of the role of assumptions in proving, and I investigate what it might mean and look like for instruction to promote this goal.…

A third-grade teacher and a teacher educator argue that, in an elementary mathematics class in which the teacher is encouraging the children to communicate and justify their mathematical ideas, the features of a mathematical task shape the mathematical discourse. They conjecture that divergent tasks, problems with many correct answers, may…

This brief article describes one third-grade classroom's experience engaging in a lesson plan inspired by Larry Yanez's "Cocina Jaiteca" and images of the cheerful kitchen. In the lesson, the students were to draw their own kitchens based on their observations of the many details in Yanez's kitchen example, such as the calendar on the wall,…