Summer slide, or the loss of student learning progress over the summer months, is of concern to parents and educators. While summer school has been offered as a possible solution, it can be expensive and difficult to serve all students.  Lighter touch strategies such as engaging students to read and complete book activities through the summer months are popular alternatives.  One such program, Kids Read Now (KRN), engages K-5 students with both school-based and home-based activities while mailing them up to nine self-selected high-quality books. Additionally, parents receive weekly voice or text messages with nudges and tips for reading to and with their children. Students who report reading their selected books receive certificates and a prize. KRN has completed two quasi-experimental studies by Borman and colleagues.  In both studies, students who chose to participate in the program were matched with students who did not choose to participate. The five schools...

A study from Smolkowski et al. (2022), published in January 2022 reported on an evaluation of We Have Skills and its impact on both students and teachers. We Have Skills (WHS) is a short, universal curriculum that focuses on improving early elementary students’ academic and social skills, in the meantime increasing teacher classroom management effectiveness.   From 2015 to 2019, 127 early elementary teachers and their 2,817 students from multiple states were randomly assigned to either an immediate-intervention condition or a no-additional-intervention condition. Teachers assigned to the intervention condition received the WHS curriculum as a package, which included videos, skill tickets, a detailed 166-page teacher’s guide, access to the Elementary Social Behavior Assessment (an online screening system), and a brief initial training. Teachers assigned to the control condition were asked to teach students as they normally would.   The results showed that observer impressions of student behavior were positive but...

Modern-day children have been shown to have an egocentric tendency at an early stage of their cognitive and moral development. They seem to lack understanding of, sympathy for and appreciation of non-human animals and the ecosystem. In order to help children develop a pro-environmental perspective early, Ngai et al. launched a pilot study which involved establishing an animal-assisted school-based humane education programme - CARing Kids – in an attempt to educate children on empathy and prosocial behaviours through social and emotional learning (SEL).   The CARing Kids programme involved a canine-companion reading activity. A corpus of 110 students from two primary schools participated in six sessions of picture story book reading in the company of a canine, followed by a discussion of the story. This offered children the opportunity to have direct interaction with service canines to build up their empathy and kindness.    Analysis showed that students who joined the CARing...

The use of parental text messaging to positively influence children’s educational behaviors has gained popularity. A recent study conducted by Catherine and colleagues hypothesized that a text message intervention using the MORE@Home app would be beneficial to enhancing parents’ engagement, and the specific content of text messages could affect students’ academic behaviors. Three components were examined: personalization of messages; reading view differences; and the use of goal setting. The research design tested each possible combination of the intervention components by involving 5172 second and third-grade students (4993 families) and their parents from thirty elementary schools in the research study. The results from the study showed that personalized messages were more effective than non-personalized messages (ES = +0.08, p < 0.05), spending an extra 1.6 minutes using the app (ES = +0.11, p < 0.01), and completing 0.7 books (ES = +0.12, p < 0.01). It also showed that the combination...

A recent meta-analysis by Fishstrom and colleagues examined the effects of academic interventions on academic achievement and academic anxiety in students in kindergarten to Grade 6. The meta-analysis of 11 studies included 34 effect sizes, of which 17 were for academic achievement outcomes, and 17 were for academic anxiety outcomes. The results revealed statistically significant differences favoring academic treatments (g = 0.63, k = 11), consistent with existing research. In contrast, no statistically significant differences were found for academic anxiety outcomes (g = -0.06, k = 11). Despite the limitation of the small number of studies with elementary school students that met the criteria, and the difficulties in measuring academic anxiety, the study suggested that academic anxiety is not necessarily relieved by academic interventions.   Source: Fishstrom, S., Wang, H.-H., Bhat, B. H., Daniel, J., Dille, J., Capin, P., & Vaughn, S. (2022). A meta-analysis of the effects of academic...

School-based social emotional learning (SEL) programmes first emerged in North America and have gradually become an important component of early childhood education across the globe. In view of the nature of social-emotional competencies being inherently embodied and culturally responsive, the authors have proposed a bioecological and embodied framework for the development and implementation of a SEL curriculum, as shown in the figure below. (Adopted from Figure 1 in Hayashi et al., 2022) Following CASEL’s Framework for Systemic Social and Emotional Learning, they emphasized that the design of any SEL curriculum or program should consider the culture and adopt situated and embodied learning in order to allow children to be able to develop SEL competencies that are transferrable to or applied in other contexts, such as at home or in the community. As different cultures have differences in values, beliefs, and norms or customs, the interactions, behaviours, and engagements considered to...

Recently, Bratlie et al. conducted a study of a second-grade Norwegian morphology program. Even though this digital game-based program was not used specifically with Language Minority (LM) students, the researchers sought to examine the differences between LM students and Language Majority (LMA) students’ performances in the program as well as the initial language literacy and context’s influences on students’ performance. To understand the differences and relationships, researchers studied 717 second-grade students from 12 schools across 3 municipalities in Norway via three data collection points: before the training, within 3 weeks after the training, and approximately 6 months after the training. Among the studied population, 26% of the participants had a LM background, while the majority of students (61%) had both parents as native Scandinavian language speakers. In general, the 8-week long morphology program significantly influenced students’ morphological word learning no matter their language background. In addition, the influence of the...

A recent meta-analysis evaluated the effectiveness of interventions for elementary students with math difficulties. To be included in the review, studies had to use randomized or quasi-experimental designs and evaluate word-problem solving interventions. A total of 52 studies were included in the review. Overall, results showed a significant positive effect for mathematics outcomes (ES = +1.01), with a high variability suggesting the presence of factors influencing the effect. By analyzing these factors, the results showed a larger effect when the students involved had only math difficulties (ES = +1.04) compared to both math and reading difficulties (ES = +0.66). When the intervention was delivered in large groups (more than 8 students), the effect was larger than for one-to-one or small-groups (ES = +1.41, +0.86, respectively). Intensive interventions (3 to 5 times a week) were more effective than interventions implemented one or two times weekly (ES = +1.15, +0.76, respectively). A...

Incorporating educational content into digital games and using those games as part of the elementary school curriculum to deliver traditional subjects has become a recent trend. Yu and Tsuei have launched a quasi-experimental study in digital game-based learning, examining its effect on the learning progress of elementary school students in Chinese language-arts. The authors recruited 126 4th graders (aged 9–10 years) from six classes in an elementary school in Taipei, Taiwan, with four classes as experimental group, and two classes as control group. Throughout a six-week experimental period, while the control-group classes read e-books on personal computers for 20 minutes each week, two experimental-group classes were assigned to play the game Legendary Beast Rescue I (EG I), and the other two classes, the game Legendary Beast Rescue II (EG II) for the same time span as the students’ learning of Chinese language-arts. The two games differ in their rewards mechanisms,...