Teacher and School Concerns and Actions on Elementary School Children Digital Safety.

Elementary school children are spending more time using digital technologies. Teachers and schools are concerned about the student's digital safety. We interviewed ten elementary school teachers virtually to understand their concerns and understand the actions they take regarding elementary school children's digital safety. Using thematic analysis, we identified themes of concerns and actions of teachers and schools on elementary school children's digital safety. Some digital safety concerns discussed by the teachers included content-related concerns such as accessing inappropriate content, contact-related concerns, inappropriate contact with others online, sharing personal information, lack of understanding of danger, conduct-related concerns regarding cyberbullying and digital footprint, contract-related concerns such as digital security and privacy, and home-related concerns. Teachers and schools have taken several actions to address these concerns. Some of the digital safety actions included security measures and limits, monitoring student activities, providing education on digital safety, and support from guidance counselors. This study has implications for elementary school educators, administrators, parents, and students on the safe use of digital technologies. Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11528-022-00803-z.

Examining How Emergency Remote Teaching Influenced Mathematics Teaching.

The COVID-19 pandemic forced teachers worldwide to shift to emergency remote teaching (i.e., virtual teaching). As teachers return to their classrooms for in-person teaching, there is a need to examine how remote teaching influences teachers' instruction. This study examined teachers' use of digital technologies and specific mathematics activities both during remote teaching and during in-person teaching after returning to their classrooms. The study also examined how teacher participants reported how the pandemic influenced their mathematics teaching. Data analysis indicated statistically significant differences in the frequency of use of all digital technologies except for mathematics games, meaning that mathematics games are used now as much during in-person teaching as remote teaching. Teacher participants also reported that the largest influences of the pandemic and remote teaching have had on their in-person mathematics teaching was the use of general, non-mathematics specific technologies to support organization, the use of hands-on or virtual manipulatives, and the benefit of formative assessment. Implications for future research include the need to examine teachers' use of digital technologies and mathematics activities more closely during in-person teaching and leverage interviews as a possible way to more closely study teachers' experiences.

The Measurement Properties of the Assessing Math Concepts' Assessments of Primary Students' Number Sense Skills.

The purpose of this study was to examine the measurement properties of the Assessing Math Concepts AMC Anywhere Hiding and Ten Frame Assessments, formative assessments of primary students' number sense skills. Each assessment has two parts, where Part 1 is intended to be foundational skills for part two. Part 1 includes manipulatives whereas Part 2 does not. Student data from 228 kindergarten through second grade teachers with a total of 3,666 students was analyzed using Rasch scaling. Data analyses indicated that when the two assessments were examined separately the intended order of item difficulty was clear. When the parts of both assessments were analyzed together, the items in Part 2 were not consistently more difficult that the items in Part 1. This suggests an alternative sequence of tasks in that students may progress from working with a specific number with manipulatives then without manipulatives rather than working with a variety of numbers with manipulatives before moving onto assessments without manipulatives.