While achievement gaps have been well-established, much remains to be understood about the manner and extent to which school leadership either increases or decreases student access to opportunity to learn. The current study uses nationally representative samples of U.S. and Flemish students in Grade 4 from the 2011 Trends in International…

This study, focusing on inverse relations, examines how representative U.S. and Chinese elementary textbooks may provide opportunities to learn fundamental mathematical ideas. Findings from this study indicate that both of the U.S. textbook series (grades K-6) in comparison to the Chinese textbook samples (grades 1-6), presented more instances of…

In many low- and lower-middle-income countries, private schools are often considered to offer better quality of education than government schools. Yet, there is a lack of evidence to date on their role in reducing inequalities: namely, the extent to which private schooling improves learning among the most disadvantaged children. Our paper uses…

Drawing on an analysis of education policies and qualitative research data, the impact of education reform on the roles of English primary headteachers and their Finnish counterparts is examined and compared. Global forces have resulted in similar policy trends in both countries but owing to contrasting cultural values and education traditions…

We document and analyze the emergence of a substantial gender gap in mathematics in the early years of schooling using a large, recent, and nationally representative panel of children in the United States. There are no mean differences between boys and girls upon entry to school, but girls lose more than two-tenths of a standard deviation relative…

This paper explores patterns of growth in participation in six Anglophone and seven Francophone countries in SSA. The countries are Kenya, Malawi, Nigeria, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia, Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Madagascar, Mali, Niger and Senegal. These countries all have large scale Universal Primary Education programmes and all have…

Finds significant incidental learning of word meanings in 447 American and Chinese children in third and fifth grades. Notes that, in each country, incidental word learning appeared on both easy and difficult test questions and among children of all levels of ability. Suggests that incidental acquisition of word meanings while reading is a…

This article draws on the Sustainability Education in European Primary Schools (SEEPS) Project, which was an EU-funded project examining approaches to sustainability education. As part of that project the team developed a case study approach to the individual country contributions to the overall project, which concluded by developing a model based…

Presents teaching strategies by which elementary social studies teachers can introduce a study of China. Students compare (1) their daily schedules with that of a sixth grader in Tientsin, (2) American and Chinese popular music, and (3) costs of living and income in China and America. Journal availability: see SO 506 831. (AV)

Measures native skilled, nonnative skilled, and nonnative nonskilled English readers' word reading times. Finds reading times of native skilled readers were independent of word length, word location, and grammatical word classification compared to nonnative readers. Finds that native readers' reading time was different from nonnative skilled…

To gauge the effect that different attitudes and child-rearing practices may have on the development of empathy, the responses to an empathy test of 64 Athenian children were compared to those obtained earlier from 46 children in Los Angeles. (Author/AM)

States that linking research on primary schooling and comparative educational science has been slow in coming and mostly in the form of reciprocal affirmation of a practice-oriented type of reflection. Explains that this thesis is elaborated systematically and exemplified by comparative research on primary schooling oriented by the primary school…

Compares the effects of mothers' mode of instruction on their children's memory test performance. Subjects were from the United States and Guatemala. A nongeneral, contextually influenced effect was found only for tests relying on verbal material and for children whose exposure to verbal instruction is not as extreme as in Western culture.…

Behavior problems reported by teachers for 359 Jamaican and 665 U.S. children ages 6 to 11 were compared. In conjunction with previous research, results suggest that Jamaican children find school exceptionally stressful, although overall findings demonstrate the considerable similarity of teacher-reported problems across cultures. (SLD)

This report presents detailed summaries of the responses of seven exemplary elementary teachers to a series of open-ended questions about effective social studies curriculum and instruction. The questions addressed the teachers' opinions about elementary social studies purposes and goals, content selection, and representation modes; forms and…