Chess in Primary Schools is a whole-school approach to teaching primary school children how to play chess. Children take 30 hours of chess lessons delivered by a tutor who is an experienced chess player, and the school is given the option to set up a chess club as a lunchtime or after-school activity. Chess classes are delivered during the school…

Mental abacus (MA) is a technique of performing fast, accurate arithmetic using a mental image of an abacus; experts exhibit astonishing calculation abilities. Over 3 years, 204 elementary school students (age range at outset: 5-7 years old) participated in a randomized, controlled trial to test whether MA expertise (a) can be acquired in standard…

This article examines the effects of one year of exposure to "Learning to Read in a Healing Classroom" (LRHC) on the reading and math skills of second- to fourth-grade children in the low-income and conflict-affected Democratic Republic of the Congo. LRHC consists of two primary components: teacher resource materials that infuse…

In lower- and middle-income countries, including Ghana, students in rural areas dramatically underperform their urban peers. Rural schools struggle to attract and retain professionally trained teachers (GES 2012; World Bank 2012). We explore one potential solution to the problem of teacher recruitment: distance instruction. Through a cluster…

The present study aims to contribute to the understanding of the effects of music education, in particular music composition as a classroom activity for fifth- and sixth-graders. The intervention (experimental condition) focused on a three-step-model for music composition, based on the Cultural Historical Activity Theory of education, and has been…

Using reliable and valid measures of students' outcomes which are sensitive to change is critical for obtaining interpretable and therefore useful results from evaluations of school-based interventions. While measurement development for use in experimental evaluations receives a great deal of attention in the U.S., it lags behind in low-income…

Catch Up® Numeracy is a one to one intervention for learners who are struggling with numeracy. It consists of two 15-minute sessions per week, delivered by teaching assistants (TAs). The approach is based on research indicating that numeracy is not a single skill, but a composite of several component skills that are relatively discrete. The…

The purpose of this study was to determine the effects of an early numeracy preventative Tier 2 intervention on the mathematics performance of first-grade students with mathematics difficulties. Researchers used a pretest-posttest control group design with randomized assignment of 139 students to the Tier 2 treatment condition and 65 students to…