Let's say you are a Grades 3-5 teacher in search of an activity sheet on different fraction notations. A search in May 2022 on the popular resources sharing site TeachersPayTeachers (TpT) yielded 2,832 results, 105 of which were free. With so many options, how would you go about choosing a resource for your students? What would factor into your…

Teachers can use literature written for the young adolescent as a powerful tool for establishing and enhancing the community in the classroom that is arguably a necessity for learning to occur. In order for the young adolescent to be successful in the school classroom, a shared sense of community must exist. The students must feel connected to,…

There has never been a more pressing need for students to learn how to evaluate scientific information online than during the COVID-19 outbreak. Information, misinformation, and disinformation spread quickly across online news and social media platforms. This misleading or incorrect scientific information about infectious diseases could lead to…

Young learners need to cultivate new democratic skills and dispositions to fully participate in civic dialogues, but many teachers have yet to integrate suitable experiences into their curricula. These new media skills apply established aspects of citizenship like deliberation, pluralism, and participation towards engagement with various forms of…

This topic brief is one in a series on personalized learning prepared for Conversations with Innovators, 2018. Student voice is a critical element in implementing student-driven personalized learning. Yet it is one that is often marginalized or ignored. Student-driven personalization is a critical concept in the pursuit of a personalized learning…

As part of Japanese Lesson study research focusing on "comparing and describing likelihoods", fifth grade elementary students used real-world data in decision-making. Sporting statistics facilitated opportunities for informal inference, where data were used to make and justify predictions.

Methods for facilitating students' standards-based consumer literacy are addressed via the use of problem solving with food and product labels. Fifth graders will be able to: (1) provide detailed analysis of food and product labels; (2) understand large themes, including production, distribution, and consumption; and (3) explore consumer…

History labs invite students to examine primary and secondary source documents related to an essential question. The sources used in a history lab should represent multiple perspectives so that students are aware of the varying accounts of and opinions about historic events. By being exposed to multiple perspectives, students also learn about…

Interactive writing is an instructional practice widely considered effective and most appropriate for emergent writers. This article asserts that it is a valuable method for more fluent writers in grades 2-5. It outlines the basic lesson sequence and proposes four key shifts to adapt interactive writing for older, more fluent writers: 1) The…

High-stakes standardized tests in reading and limited instructional time are two powerful disincentives for teaching economics in the elementary classroom. In this article, integrating instruction in poetry and economic decision-making is presented as one way to maximize the use of scarce instructional time. Following a brief introduction to the…

This research brief highlights findings from the technical report (published separately). Student-level analyses were conducted with the SEL Skills Survey and the Student Climate Survey to determine if a single measure of students' SEL skill acquisition and perceptions of school climate is possible. [For the Technical Report, see ED629195.]

Hopscotch, basketball, or hide-and-seek? Children have many choices at recess, and while making these choices they must consider and make trade-offs. The way they make these decisions is not that different from the thought processes engineers use when making design trade-offs. Engineers have to make trade-offs because a design that meets all…

The reliability of data is a critical issue in decision-making for practitioners in the school. Percent Agreement and Cohen's kappa are the two most widely reported indices of inter-rater reliability, however, a recent Monte Carlo study on the reliability of multi-category scales found other indices to be more trustworthy given the type of data…

Education leaders and much literature exhort teachers and school leaders to use data more often and more effectively to guide planning and decision making--called, "data driven decision making." This term is ubiquitous in literature and reform discourse, but "on the ground," so to speak, practitioners face significant challenges in analyzing,…

The optimal school learning environment for gifted students is one where scholastic rigor is the standard. This rigor is needed both to stimulate the students intellectually and enhance their academic growth. The integration of critical thinking skills into the daily content and lessons is essential for achieving this rigor. This infusion, along…