This study examines the role of nature in children's literature on bookshelves in early childhood education settings to explore how books in kindergarten classrooms represent nature and the relationship between nature and humans. The findings are (a) cursory references, (b) human autonomy over nature, and (c) nature as a learning opportunity.…

Background/Context: Both correlational and experimental evidence suggests that having access to books can be a key resource for accelerating the literacy outcomes for children. Results from a 20-year study across 27 nations by Evans, Kelley, Sikora, and Treiman (2010), suggest that children growing up in homes with many books obtain 3 years more…

Purpose: We examine the content, context, and management of literacy learning opportunities in a large, diverse sample in the US and whether these opportunities were differentiated by children's oral language and decoding skill levels. Method: A total of 1,404 children in 153 preschool-through-third-grade classrooms were observed for several…

The first year of teaching has and continues to be fraught with challenges for early educators in public school contexts across the United States. A persistent problem that has been documented across the globe is the ability of novice teachers to engage in developmentally appropriate practices (DAP) with their students. We examine this issue…

Recent studies suggest that benefiting early from both a cochlear implant (CI) and exposure to cued speech (CS, support system for the perception of oral language) positively impacts deaf children's speech perception, speech intelligibility, and reading. This study aims to show how: 1/CS-based speech perception ("cue reading"), and…

The global COVID-19 pandemic has passed. This process required greater attention and care to the specifics of the organization of distance learning and the resolution of problems that arose for participants in the educational process. By late 2021 face-to-face teaching was returning but Russian aggression against Ukraine interrupted the…

Children and youth have benefited from afterschool programs in terms of academic, physical health, school attendance, promotion, graduation, and social and emotional outcomes. Afterschool programming in general--and science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) afterschool programming in particular--is also popular among school officials and…

Prior research has found that financial investments in North Carolina's early childhood education programs--Smart Start and NC Pre-K--generated positive effects on student achievement in reading and mathematics through eighth grade (Bai et al., 2020). The current study examined if these effects were moderated by two dimensions of educational…

This study delves into the complex dynamics of leadership within Alberta's K-12 education system, specifically focusing on the relationship between age, gender, maternity and parental leaves and women's career progression. Using an explanatory mixed-method approach, comprising a survey of 416 educational leaders and two focus groups of 20 women in…

California is on the cusp of implementing universal preschool--a step that could help level the playing eld for young children. Over the next few years, all four-year-olds will become eligible for Transitional Kindergarten (TK), which has been part of the state's early learning programs since 2012. In the report, "Setting the Stage for…

Chile is known for universal school choice policies and a high level of economic segregation. In part, segregation has been linked to selective school admission policies. Chile implemented a centralized school admission system (New School Admission System), where PK-12 schools must accept any applicant, and lottery assignment is used for…

This report provides an overview of kindergarten readiness of six Baltimore City Public Schools (City Schools) kindergarten cohorts from the 2016-17 to the 2021-22 school year. This report is accompanied by the Annual Digest of City Schools Kindergarten Statistics, 2022 Edition (Baltimore Education Research Consortium [BERC], 2022), which provides…

Federal law requires states to develop systems to hold K-12 schools accountable for the outcomes of all students. This includes using data to illuminate how historically marginalized groups of students, including English Learners (ELs), are disadvantaged by systems that fail to meet their distinct needs. But for this to be useful for school…

Owing to its recognition as a 21st-century skill, computational thinking (CT) is currently being introduced into school curricula around the world. However, in-service teachers are largely unprepared for this implementation, which, in turn, makes teacher educators (TEds) important stakeholders in preparing prospective teachers to integrate CT into…

We use nearly 430 million standardized test scores, including test scores from more than 6,500 rural school districts, to describe educational opportunity in rural America. Although we find modest differences in outcomes between rural and nonrural students overall, these disparities are larger for specific socioeconomic, racial-ethnic, and…