Learning is an active enterprise, where three dimensions stand out, cognitive, social, and physical, and, in addition, not all students learn in the same way. Grounded on these ideas, this article reports a study that aims to understand and characterize the performance of pre-service teachers when experiencing active learning strategies during…

Writing skills grow along a predictable developmental trajectory, yet what is considered "writing" can look very different in preschool and early elementary classrooms. The way in which writing may look in each setting reflects that teachers are working with different sets of learning standards, with different conceptualizations of…

Elementary school students are often placed into groups with peers of similar reading ability for leveled guided reading instruction. Through this practice, students are differentially exposed to reading skills, strategies, and texts that are presumed to match their reading ability. This widespread practice is problematic given that (1) current…

Many states use research-based mathematics curricula as an instructional tool to improve mathematics performance outcomes on state assessment scores. The problem was that despite the implementation of a research-based curriculum, students at XYZ Elementary School (pseudonym) had underperformed on the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for…

This holistic, mixed-methods action research case study aimed to determine the influence of professional development on participants' mathematical teaching practices and how the changes influenced students' opportunities for discourse. In this two-year study, participants engaged in two professional development phases and implemented new…

Reading proficiency levels among elementary-aged students in the United States have been alarmingly unsatisfactory for decades. The absence of basic foundational reading skills will induce struggles in every other subject area, causing students to feel exhausted, defeated, and fall behind. Intervention can be successful when instruction is…

This study investigated how Mississippi teachers perceive the effectiveness of student engagement in elementary classrooms. A descriptive statistical study was conducted using a web-based survey sent to elementary school teachers in central and delta school districts in Mississippi. Quantitative methods were used, and data were collected and…

One pedagogical approach to challenge a persistent misconception is to get students to test a conjecture whereby they are confronted with the misconception. A common misconception about a 'direct linear relationship' between area and perimeter is well-documented. In this study, Year 4-6 students were presented with a conjecture that a rectangle…

For more than a decade, government primary-school teachers in many parts of India have been using mathematics textbooks based on National Curriculum Framework 2005 (NCF 2005). While curriculum and textbook development is often debated, teachers' use of textbooks does not receive enough attention in policy and research. This article, drawing from a…

The importance of creativity in education has been increasingly recognised by policy-makers and, as contemporary research argues, the way curricula are organised and implemented impact on children's creativity. Scotland has recently introduced a new curriculum, the 'Curriculum for Excellence' (CfE), but there has yet been no research on how the…

In today's dynamic global economy, integrated units of study are particularly important. Students who are fluent in several disciplines and comfortable moving among them can make meaningful connections and maintain enhanced understandings (Sias et al. 2016). This article shares an integrated STEAM unit that is grounded in the science disciplinary…

This study presents a teaching experiment in which second-grade primary school students compared a city and a town according to population estimates. The activities were presented to them as Fermi problems and required an analysis of the reality to identify sub-problems that students could deal with. The students' products were analyzed from the…

It is important to determine the behaviors of primary school pre-service teachers, who have successfully completed the "Mathematics Textbook Review" course during their undergraduate education, regarding the use of textbooks in their professional life. Therefore, it is important to determine the approaches of pre-service teachers who…

Students' difficulties in scientific argumentation have been widely reported in the literature. Researchers argue that these difficulties result mainly from students' lack of understanding of the goals and norms of argumentation. Therefore, designing and implementing appropriate instructional scaffolds to facilitate such essential knowledge of…

We investigated the effectiveness and social validity of a 17-week teacher-implemented whole-class Self-Regulated Strategy Development (SRSD) story writing intervention with 6-7-year-old students in New Zealand. We used a mixed methods intervention design. In the quantitative strand, we conducted a quasi-experiment in which students either…