Background: Teachers' perspectives provide crucial insights into classroom practice in early childhood education settings. Although many kindergarten programmes emphasise play "and" assessment to support children's learning and development, recent research suggests that there are some disparities between teachers' articulated role of…

The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics's "Principles to Actions" (NCTM, 2014) cites posing purposeful questions and eliciting and using evidence of student thinking as effective mathematics teaching practices. Interviewing students creates opportunities for teachers to develop these practices. Through interviewing, they can try…

This article illustrates and differentiates the unique role cognitive interviews and think-aloud interviews play in developing and validating assessments. Specifically, we describe the use of (a) cognitive interviews to gather empirical evidence to support claims about the intended construct being measured and (b) think-aloud interviews to gather…

A 7-month mathematics proficiency program was conducted in a primary Australian Indigenous community school. This paper focuses on outlining the specific methodologies employed to explore how students' mathematical proficiency changed throughout the implementation of the program in Years 2 to 4 (~ 7 to 9 years old). A mixed methods research design…

Standards-Based Grading is being implemented in every corner of education. Schools that take on this type of implementation progress through an extensive change in mindset. With any extensive change, it is preferable that the outcomes match the effort put in. This qualitative research examined the perceptions of four elementary classroom teachers…

The purpose of this study was to examine patterns of mathematical practices evident during children's interactions with touchscreen mathematics virtual manipulatives. Researchers analyzed 33 Kindergarten children's interactions during activities involving apps featuring mathematical content of early number sense or quantity in base ten, recorded…

Kuwait, an Arabic-speaking country in which English serves important functions, has adopted so many methods in teaching EFL in public schools which in 1993 started with the Grammar-Translation and continued until 2005 the eclectic method was applied. In 2005 the emphasis on communicative techniques and almost entirely through listening and…

To acknowledge the lasting and increasing influence of Halliday's theory of systemic functional linguistics (SFL) on teacher education, this article outlines Critical SFL Praxis (CSFLP) in teacher education as an activist effort in research and practice. Informed by systemic functional linguistics, the critical approach seeks to push back against…

Miguel A. Cardona, the former commissioner of education in Connecticut, became the U.S. Secretary of Education on March 2, 2021, taking office in the midst of an historic pandemic that had profoundly reshaped the nation's schools. In his initial months on the job, Cardona- also a one-time public school teacher and principal--has focused closely on…

Jean Kirshner holds a Ph.D. in Education and Human Resource Development from Colorado State University and specializes in literacy and teacher education. Jean started her career as the Early Childhood Director at Saint Ignatius Grammar School, Chicago in 1988. After two years she joined the Child Opportunity Program in Denver as a Head Start…

Kindergarten education is changing. Current reforms have increased accountability structures requiring teachers to integrate assessments throughout their instruction to support academic learning while retaining developmentally appropriate pedagogies such as play-based learning. Despite these reforms, comparatively little research has been…

Research Findings: Research has demonstrated the developmental and educational benefits of play. Despite these benefits, teacher-directed academic instruction is prominent in kindergarten. There is increasing acknowledgment in curricula and policies of the challenges presented by a lack of play in classrooms and the need to support academic…

Assessment is often used to hold schools and teachers accountable for student learning. Assessment instruments are used as tools to guide curriculum choices and lesson plans, from districts to individual students. In any discipline, knowing what students know and what they have learned following a lesson is important on multiple levels. This is…

Integrated Performance Assessments (IPAs) provide elementary, secondary, and postsecondary instructors with the opportunity to align standards-based foreign language instruction with assessment practices. While IPA guidelines make it clear that all three modes of communication are to be assessed, the limited body of research on IPAs provides few…

What purposes might literary translation serve in the K-12 classroom? In this article, I use practitioner research to explore a heritage language poetry translation project I taught with third and fourth grade multi- and monolingual students in a suburban independent school. Students interviewed family members about their heritage languages,…