Using a sociohistoric developmental lens, this paper traces the construction of texts composed by fifth graders in an urban classroom in order to answer the following questions: How do children develop as writers in school? How do writing and drawing function in children's texts? How do teaching practices shape children's writing development?…

Increasingly, children today are becoming disconnected from the natural environments resulting in a diminished sense of self, place and community. In an attempt to find out their perceptions, attitudes and values about the natural world, twenty-five Year 6 and 7 students from a northern Adelaide primary school participated in a nature-play case…

Conceptual grammatical knowledge is an area which causes problems at different levels of education. This article examines the ideas of conceptual change theory as a basis for establishing a new grammar teaching method. The research strategy which I use is educational design research and the research data have been collected from teacher students…

This qualitative study examined children's concept formation and writing emergence from the perspective of graphical multi-signification by observing the free drawing activities provided by four girls and six boys, aged four to five, in a Chinese class at a Chinese heritage language school in the USA. Children's capacity for graphical…

In a national context where the language rights of indigenous people have been recognized constitutionally since 2003, we deal with the following questions: How can bilingual education programmes in Mexico be clearly defined and applied? And what exactly are the final objectives of a bilingual education programme? We shall address the issue of the…

Over the past decade it has been frequently reported that East Asian students are outperforming their Western counterparts in international tests of mathematics at middle-school level. This paper probes classroom discourse in an attempt to shed some light on this phenomenon. Data were collected from a sample of Chinese Year 8 students in a normal…

Many studies have found benefits of positive psychological interventions, such as gratitude promotion or thinking about best possible selves, for adolescents and adults. Almost no research, however, has been conducted on the efficacy of such interventions for children. The authors' primary goal was to compare the outcomes of gratitude promotion…

This article, grounded in the belief that art is a way of understanding, describes when faculty asked young people of various ages to draw themselves as writers. Several examples of students' work are coupled with a discussion and a rationale for integrating drawing into the assessment process. Asking students to draw, write, and talk about their…

Children's work documents their thinking and the details they note as they learn more. Over time, by drawing, dictating, or writing about their observations, children can reveal and deepen their understanding of science concepts. Documenting work to further understanding and sharing information is part of the National Science Education Teaching…

The author has always been fascinated by old photographs. As she looks at them, she wonders about the people. Who were they? What were their lives like? Where was this photo taken? A moment in time is frozen forever, for all to see. Inspired by old photographs, the author describes how her fifth-grade classes made their own "photographs" by…

Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, who have been married over 30 years, take items from popular culture and transform them into giant sculptures that are on display all over the world. Their installations include clothespins, baseball bats, garden shovels and ice cream cones, to name a few. This transformation of everyday things is a great…

This paper presents the results of an experiment investigating the development of elementary-school dual-language learners' conceptual knowledge about processes of erosion, deposition, and transportation caused by water movement. To elicit students' ideas, researchers asked students to answer four open-ended questions using written answers and/or…

Multimodal Pedagogies in Diverse Classrooms examines how the classroom can become a democratic space founded on the integration of different histories, modes of representation, feelings, languages and discourses, and is essential reading for anyone interested in the connection between multimodality, pedagogy, democracy and social justice in…

Sixty-two elementary pre-service teachers enrolled in a mathematics methods course were asked to "draw math" at the beginning and end of the semester. These drawings were used to examine the initial perceptions and how these changed by the end of the semester of methods and field experiences. Findings describe the various drawings and…

This study sets out to examine Finnish and Russian children's representations of intellectual competence as contextualised in the hierarchies of abilities, age and gender. Finnish and Russian pupils, aged 11-12 years, were asked to draw pictures of an intelligent person and an ordinary person. It was found that gender appearance of intelligent men…