The purpose of this study was to examine the efficacy of IXL Math in an elementary school context, using a randomized-control trial (RCT). This study examined mathematics achievement trajectories of 545 Grades 3-5 students across four elementary schools in a small Michigan school district during the 2022-23 school year. Teachers were randomly…

Context: As schools themselves became held accountable for absences, researchers and policymakers have consequently focused on what at school might be driving absenteeism and what are the consequences. Yet overall, research on classrooms and absenteeism remains sparse. What has been established is that absent students negatively affect their…

This case study explores the perceptions of students regarding their engagement in interreligious learning and teaching in one Australian Catholic Primary School. The study probes the learners' understandings of what interreligious learning and teaching looks like in their context and how it might relate to their understandings of their evolving…

Increasing evidence suggests that success in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields is not only dependent upon one's actual STEM-relevant abilities but also upon one's STEM-relevant attitudes--in particular, math and spatial attitudes. Here, we examine whether simply mentioning the math or spatial relevance of a task affects…

The transition to secondary school can be a challenging period for adolescents. Although several questionnaires exist to measure transition-related concerns, there is a need to develop a comprehensive survey for assessing the knowledge and skills that adolescents require to adapt effectively to a new school. Thus, the purpose of this study was to…

The COVID-19 pandemic altered the ways that teacher educators could provide teacher candidates (TCs) with clinically-rich opportunities to build TCs' skills and self-efficacy related to teaching reading. The purpose of this qualitative study was to investigate the experiences of 19 TCs who participated in a semester-long virtual reading tutoring…

Computational thinking (CT) has gained considerable attention and in-depth discussion over the last two decades. Although the significance of CT has been highlighted, it could be challenging for educators to teach CT. Fortunately, adopting robots in education has been evidenced to be of benefit to promoting students' learning motivation, CT, and…

Phenomena-based approaches have become popular for elementary school teachers to engage children's innate curiosity in the natural world. However, integrating such phenomena-based approaches in existing science courses within teacher education programs present potential challenges for both preservice elementary teachers (PSETs) and for laboratory…

Writing is a fundamental skill linked closely with academic achievement, day-to-day communication, formal negotiations, and more. However, due to their lack of contextual experience, learning to write has been a demanding and complex cognitive process for most learners. As a result, learners struggle to exhibit positive learning behaviours and…

This article offers a framework for more equitable classroom reading assessment known as a Critical Assessment Practices (CAPS) approach. CAPS includes a set of four principles that teachers can use to partner with, and to empower, students to support more equitable and informative classroom-based reading assessment. Teachers can apply the CAPS…

Most extant research on parental socialization for child appreciation has either conflated appreciation and gratitude or fallen foul of a conceptual-operational mismatch, yielding theoretical controversies and inconsistent results. Using a matched conceptualization and operationalization of appreciation and based on three waves of data from 496…

Dialogic teaching -- in which teachers and students address controversial issues -- has become increasingly common in school education to promote civic participation in deliberative democracy. This study addresses this question: when leading whole-class discussions on controversial issues, what discursive moves could teachers adopt to enact…

We investigated the role of socioeconomic status (SES) in the unfolding of vocabulary and text-comprehension skills in language minority bilingual children, who are educated exclusively in their L2. For comparison, a monolingual control group was also tested, consisting of children of the same age and schooling. We administered a synonyms task to…

Teacher-student relationship and students' social competence were investigated in relation to the quality of educational dialogue. The data consisted of 151 video-recorded Grade 2 lessons. The teachers (N = 50) also rated their students' (N = 664) social competence and the teacher-student relationship. In terms of teacher-student relationships,…

States and school districts in the USA have begun to create and implement curriculum to promote elementary students' nascent STEM-related interests and to generate their initial knowledge of careers in those fields. Evaluating the efficacy of such interventions warrants valid and reliable tools, which are not presently available for middle…