Background: In U.S. contexts, the language of "quality" early childhood education is widely invoked to evaluate the "goodness" of teaching and learning and is often leveraged in attempts to ameliorate inequities. Likewise, efforts to define and achieve generalizable conceptualizations of early childhood quality often guide what…

Signed into law by President Barack Obama in December 2015, the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) replaces No Child Left Behind (NCLB), the 2001 reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. NCLB and its Reading First mandate brought punitive accountability models and scripted core curricula into schools. Based on the language of…

Efforts to improve educational outcomes for English learners often focus on "academic language," but unfortunately the field lacks a clear, agreed-upon definition of the concept. This article reports on a design research study that focused on students' engagement in one academic practice over several months: reading and discussing…

Distinguishes between two views of writing: "writing" as composing and making meaning; and "writing down" as encoding and using literacy tools. Defines literacy as the ability to use oral and written language for the goal of self-awareness. Describes several ways to provide students with opportunities to develop literacy. (MM)

Article defined the threshold-level as the lowest level of general foreign-language ability to be recognized in the unit/credit system. It further attempted to answer the question of what the learner will need to do in a foreign language through an analysis of verbal behavior as a communicative activity. (Author/RK)

An examination of the concept "environment" leads to a number of questions that must be answered to reduce ambiguity of any particular use of the term: "What entity in the Universe is being used as the referent for 'environment'?""What is the purpose of considering that entity's environment?""What parts of the Universe external to the entity used…

Four pairs of concepts important for the descriptions of the language or form of objective statements are described. The paper addresses itself to a set of questions concerning the relations between the form of educational objectives and the function which those objectives serve. The concept pairs considered are general-specific,…

Three major meanings of "empathy" are discussed with reference to the widespread imprecision in its use. It is suggested that undifferentiated use of the term in social work education is dangerous, particularly in view of the positive valence associated with being empathetic. (Author/BH)