Elementary Education Commons^™

Black And Brown Students’ Mathematics Anxiety In Elementary School: The Use Of Restorative Justice Circles And Critical Concepts Of Care, Hope, And Love, Mariana E. Winnik

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Children navigate their world and are constantly making meaning of their experiences. Through this meaning making, children are also constructing their identities. Black and Brown children have an added layer of identity construction compared to their White peers. Black and Brown students develop their racial identity in conjunction with multiple other identities. This paper focuses specifically on how Black and Brown students construct a "mathematics identity" that is meaningful to their racial identity in order to help lessen their mathematics anxiety. I argue that the use of Restorative Justice Circles (RJC) in classrooms will allow for students to bring their …

"Clavis Aurea": An Augmented Reality Game For The Teaching Of Local History, George Koutromanos, Theodora Pittara, Christopher Tripoulas

Publications and Research

The aim of this study was the design, development, and evaluation of an Augmented Reality game to teach students about the local history of a Greek island. Design-based research served as the foundation of this study’s methodology. Experts in ICT in education, teachers with knowledge of the local history and primary education students participated in the evaluation of this study. The results of the evaluation showed that the game presents satisfactory levels of usability and that its content is compatible with the island’s local history. Among the factors influencing its use by students were internet connectivity, the large number of …

Carousel: Performance And Ritual Of A Child's Play, Erik Maniscalco

Theses and Dissertations

Carousel is a series of oil paintings inspired by my seven year old

daughter, as well as my work towards becoming a childhood educator. My

aim with this project is to explore the performative and ritualistic nature of

children’s play: focusing on the creative ways children stretch and reshape

their reality through imagined play narratives. Upon the carousel’s stage,

children select a character and take part in a performed ritual. I’ve long felt

connected to the visual vocabulary found within baroque and renaissance

styles, and I am fascinated by the mixture of amusement, tradition,

religion, and distortion imbued within the …

9/11 Teaching Guide, Andrew Destefano

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this teaching guide is to help prepare teachers and students in maximizing their visit and experience at the National September 11th Memorial and Museum, located in lower Manhattan, at the site of the former World Trade Center complex. The aim is to deepen student’s understanding of what the World Trade Center actually was, the symbolic role it played in America and in the world, and why the World Trade Center complex was built in the first place. This guide’s aim is to advance knowledge and understanding of all the various artifacts, exhibits, classes, and presentations, and to …

Multilingual/Translanguaging: Narrative Writing Through Authentic Language, Lucia E. Brea

Open Educational Resources

No abstract provided.

Improving Measurement And Expanding Meta-Analytic Knowledge: Social And Emotional Learning In Elementary And Early Childhood, Dana M. Murano

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In the last several decades, the development of student social and emotional skills in educational contexts has received much attention, both domestically and internationally. Whereas previous school-based educational practices had primarily focused on the teaching and testing of cognitive skills, we now recognize that there are constituents of academic success beyond the cognitive skills that are traditionally taught and tested, and the field of social and emotional learning (SEL) has emerged as a result. This two-study dissertation attempted to fill existing gaps in the development of SEL practices by exploring new horizons in both intervention and measurement with preschool and …

Eece 351 Teaching Science In The Elementary School, Line A. Saint-Hilaire

Open Educational Resources

No abstract provided.

Eece 798 Reading And Writing For Learning In Science, Ashraf A. Shady

Open Educational Resources

This course is designed to address the National Science Education Standards vision of instruction that should enable all students to successfully interact with the natural world. These principles include, (1) Science for all students, (2) Learning science is an active process, (3) School science reflects the intellectual and cultural traditions that characterize the practice of contemporary science, and (4) Improving science education is part of systemic education reform.

Supporting The Development Of Upper Elementary School Students’ Online Research And Comprehension Skills Through A Reframed Guided Reading Framework, Jennifer Van Allen, Vassiliki Zygouris-Coe

Publications and Research

Today’s students are increasingly required to use skills when conducting online research for academic purposes. However, students may be unable to transfer their reading skills with printed texts to reading online texts in upper grades and beyond. Strategic actions required for online research are extended to account for the unique, complex reading environment of the Internet as readers locate, navigate, evaluate, and synthesize information across multimodal sources. The guided reading framework, a popular instructional framework that is widely adopted in U.S. elementary schools, lends itself to supporting students’ use of strategic actions as they conduct online research. Informed by theory …

Participating In Democracy: Creating A Culture Of Citizenship In Primary Classrooms, Mindi Reich-Shapiro

Publications and Research

This study explores development of civic participation in children in primary (K-2) grade classrooms. It examines how teachers and administrators create a culture of democratic participation that nurtures young children's developing civic competence and embodiment of the rules, rights and responsibilities of democratic citizenship; and how young children enact these rules, rights and responsibilities within the classroom. Obstacles and challenges faced by schools in achieving these goals within the current political and socioeconomic environment that frames education in the U.S. are also explored.

P.S. 25, South Bronx: Bilingual Education And Community Control, Laura J. Kaplan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Through a methodology of oral history interviews with primary subjects and archival research, this dissertation explores the creation and evolution of P.S. 25, The Bilingual School, the first Spanish-English bilingual elementary school in New York City, as well as the entire Northeast. The Bilingual School, founded in 1968, was a product of the civil rights movement in the United States and one key manifestation of that movement in New York City, the struggle for community control of schools.

Latinos in general and Puerto Ricans in particular have been written out of the official narrative of the educational civil rights movement …

The Hidden Curriculum In Financial Literacy: Economics, Standards, And The Teaching Of Young Children, Debbie Sonu, Anand R. Marri

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

“Yo Soy Su Mama”: Latinx Mothers Raising Emergent Bilinguals Labeled As Dis/Abled, Maria Cioe Peña

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Parental involvement in the United States has been identified in both academic and mainstream literature as a defining marker in academic achievement. Yet most of the literature regarding parents and schools are written about them without including their voice or their stories. Through the use of ethnographic case studies, this dissertation presents the experiences of immigrant, monolingual Spanish-speaking Latinx women raising emergent bilingual children who are labeled as dis/abled. This research is guided by an intersectional framework and the following questions:

1. What are the mothering experiences of Spanish-speaking Latinx mothers of emergent bilingual children labeled dis/abled?

2. What values, …

Musicking And Literacy Connections In The Third Space: Leveraging The Strengths Of A Latinx Immigrant Community, Angelica Ortega

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The music-making classroom is a space were students enact their multi-literacies. This space is especially important for Latinx bilingual students who are often labeled as struggling in school. In the music-making classroom, students reinvent their identities as integral members of a learning community, are accepted as leaders by their peers and are seen as literate in their music making practices. This habitus of success can have a durable, generative and transposable impact on the identity formation for the bilingual student that goes beyond the music classroom. This occurs because the music–making classroom acts as a third space both cognitively and …

Family–School Partnerships And The Missing Voice Of Parents, Laura R. Stein

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Educators, researchers, advocates, and others agree that effective family-school partnership is an important component in best supporting the academic outcomes and future success of students. However, schools and educators struggle in forming constructive partnerships with racially and economically marginalized and oppressed parents and families, particularly low-income Black parents and families. This compromises support for low-income Black students that are already served in underfunded and under-resourced schools compared to their White middleclass counterparts. Further, this phenomenon exacerbates a widely understood academic achievement gap between low-income Black students and White middleclass students. In seeking to unearth and better understand effective strategies and …

Exacerbating Inequality: Public Schooling In The Era Of Neoliberal Standardization, Johanna Panetti Barnhart

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This work is inspired by Jean Anyon’s (1981) landmark ethnographic study, “Social Class and School Knowledge” in which she detailed the differential and class-based constructions of knowledge across five elementary schools. While this research study in no way aims to be a revision of Anyon’s work, it uses her findings to set a foundational premise that curriculum and instruction often work to contribute to the reproduction of social class. Further, this research builds on these findings to examine and analyze social class reproduction in the current neoliberal policy context of standards-based reform. A key policy shift since Anyon’s research is …

Musicalization: Early Childhood Music Access, Discourse, And Praxis In Nyc Charter Schools, 2014-2015, Andrew Aprile

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Over the past two decades, charter schools have become a hallmark of education reform in the United States. Concurrent with this movement is the increasing prominence of high stakes testing. While much research has sought to compare the effectiveness of charter schools and traditional public schools in terms of standardized assessments, scant attention has been paid to the role of arts and music in charter schools, and little has been done to distinguish the distinct strands of the charter school movement. Given what we know about the importance of music education and the growth of charter schools, it was the …

Redshirting: A Critical, Historical Analysis Of The Changing Theories, Policies, And Practices Of Children's Transition Into Kindergarten, Lisa Babel

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This paper examines the contemporary debate over redshirting within the context of a historical analysis of how schools in the United States have addressed children’s transition into kindergarten. It also considers how preparation for the transition to school is cause for concern that has varied greatly depending on the socio-economic conditions of children’s families. Redshirting is the term currently being used to define a child’s delayed entry into kindergarten, usually with the intention of creating an additional year for that child to develop socially and to strive academically. Central to understanding this phenomenon and how to address it is the …

K-12 Education, Pedagogy And Student Achievement, Genevieve Johnson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

K-12 Education, Pedagogy and Student Achievement is a study of traditional public schools and charter schools in New York City. The project takes District 2 in Manhattan and District 23 in Brooklyn as its focus in consideration of the effects of difference on student learning. This project argues for constructivist pedagogies in K-12 learning to produce literacy and equity in under-resourced school.

Music And Words: Connecting The Love Of Music With Language, Eileen P. Kennedy, Raymond Torres- Santos

Publications and Research

Children from different cultures have a natural affinity for rhymes, rhythm and music. Imagine if students were able, from the beginning of their education and experiences with academic writing and literacy, to access their unconscious and original selves from which to create their writing. The study of music can help to access this aware, inventive side that can enhance anyone’s writing. As an early childhood writing teacher and a composition teacher, we draw on our experiences with young children with words and music. We examine the relationship between music and words in an effort to bring the primitive drive of …

It's All Happening At The Zoo: Children's Environmental Learning After School, Jason A. Douglas, Cindi Katz

Publications and Research

Pairing dynamic out-of-school-time (OST) programs with zoos can encourage young people's relationships with and sense of responsibility for animals and the environment. The project presented in this article, Animal Rescuers, gave the authors the opportunity to examine how such a pairing can work. OST programs enable learning in settings that are generally unavailable during school time (Honig & McDonald, 2005). They provide space for collaboration among students, teachers, and others such as program visitors or outside educators. Taking advantage of the flexibility, location, and educational playfulness of an OST setting, the authors worked intensively with a small number of 10-12-year-old …

Profiles And Perspectives: Learning Through Descriptive Inquiry At The Cypress Hills Community School, Laura Ascenzi-Moreno, Cecilia M. Espinosa, Sarah Ferholt, Michael Loeb, Berky Lugo-Salcedo, Cecilia Traugh

Publications and Research

This paper describes the work of a collaborative study group on exploring the multiple literacies of students at one school in Brooklyn, NY. Through descriptive review, the group developed knowledge about how to support student language and bilingualism through responsive techniques.

How Much Does Poor Reading Lower Math Scores?, William (Bill) H. Williams, Sandra P. Clarkson Ph.D

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.