Julie Sarama

Julie Sarama
University of Denver · Kennedy Institute and Educational Research, Practice and Policy

PhD

About

299
Publications
576,335
Reads
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12,857
Citations
Additional affiliations
August 2012 - present
University of Denver
Position
  • Kennedy Endowed Chair in Innovative Learning Technologies and Professor
August 2000 - June 2012
University at Buffalo, State University of New York
Position
  • Professor
Description
  • Chair and Full Professor

Publications

Publications (299)
Chapter
Government agencies and members of the educational research community have petitioned for research-based curricula. The ambiguity of the phrase "research-based," however, undermines attempts to create a shared research foundation for the development of, and informed choices about, classroom curricula. This article presents a framework for the const...
Article
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Mathematics is a core component of cognition. Unfortunately, most young children and teachers cannot access research-based early childhood mathematics resources. Building on a quarter-century of research, we are developing and evaluating an innovative, integrated, intelligent, and interactive system of technologies based on empirically validated le...
Article
Learning trajectories in early mathematics instruction have received increasing attention from policymakers, educators, curriculum developers, and researchers. They are generally deemed useful for guiding curriculum standards, instructional planning, and assessment. However, the specific contributions of learning trajectories to education and child...
Article
Centering equity in our work eliminates disparities and promotes the learning and development of ALL children. Although there has been increasing focus on supporting science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) in early childhood, many children with disabilities still face challenges in accessing early STEM opportunities. In this articl...
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Given the increased diversity of the population in the United States and the importance of early science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) learning, it is crucial to identify ways to reduce racial, ethnic, and gender disparities in STEM education. This is particularly important for children with disabilities with intersecting identit...
Article
The general aim of the research was to conduct a rare test of the efficacy of hypothetical learning progressions (HLPs) and a basic assumption of basing instruction on HLPs, namely teaching each successive level is more efficacious than skipping lower levels and teaching the target level directly. The specific aim was evaluating whether counting-ba...
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Developing solution strategies, effortful procedures that students employ to solve a specific problem, is an important mathematical goal. Studies have documented intraindividual strategy variability and its significance for learning, but only some have addressed the interindividual strategic diversity across students within a classroom. This study...
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Citation: Guss, S.S.; Clements, D.H.; Sharifnia, E.; Sarama, J.; Holland, A.; Lim, C.-I.; Vinh, M. Designing Inclusive Computational Thinking Learning Trajectories for the Youngest Learners. Abstract: Foundational thinking for later use of technology, particularly coding, is necessary for an inclusive and sustainable future. Inclusive practices beg...
Article
Background The sophistication of young children's arithmetic problem-solving strategies can be influenced through experience and instructional intervention. One potential pathway is through encountering story problems where the location of the unknown quantity varies. Aims The goal of the present study is to characterize how arithmetic problem-solv...
Article
When researchers code behavior that is undetectable or falls outside of the validated ordinal scale, the resultant outcomes often suffer from informative missingness. Incorrect analysis of such data can lead to biased arguments around efficacy and effectiveness in the context of experimental and intervention research. Here, we detail a new Bayesian...
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Students’ solution strategies are important to mathematical competence; most research has focused on intraindividual strategy variability rather than classroom strategy diversity (i.e., interindividual, within each classroom). We investigated the relations between classroom strategic diversity ecologies and mathematics growth as students moved from...
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Early science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) learning experiences often exclude children with disabilities and intersecting identities. To promote learning in STEM for all children, the Curriculum Research Framework (CRF) was applied to build learning trajectories of STEM for children from birth to age 5. The CRF was extended and enhance...
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The increasing interest in early childhood mathematics education for decades has increased the need for empirically supported pedagogical strategies. However, there is little agreement on how early math might best be taught. We draw from the empirical literature to paint a picture of research-based and research-validated pedagogical approaches and...
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This study examined the effect of the Building Blocks mathematical education program on 4-year-old Turkish preschool children’s recognition level of geometrical shapes. A pretest-posttest control group experimental design was employed. The sample group was composed of randomly selected 39 preschool children (of whom 21 were in the experimental grou...
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Consequential validity (often referred to as "test fairness" in practice) is an essential aspect of educational measurement. This study evaluated the consequential validity of the Research-Based Early Mathematics Assessment (REMA). A sample of 627 children from PreK to 2nd grade was collected using the short form of the REMA. We conducted two sets...
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There is a growing interest in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) units and projects in the early childhood and elementary years.1 As former teach- ers turned researchers, we welcome this nascent move- ment, but because of our experience we suggest reflection and caution—particularly regarding the role of math in STEM educa- t...
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Investigators often rely on the proportion of correct responses in an assessment when describing the impact of early mathematics interventions on child outcomes. Here, we propose a shift in focus to the relative sophistication of problem-solving strategies and offer methodological guidance to researchers interested in working with strategies. We le...
Preprint
Focusing solely on correctness yields an incomplete understanding of what children know and can do mathematically. In a randomized teaching experiment on length-measurement, we used a validated learning trajectory to code the relative sophistication of 186 kindergarteners’ problem-solving behavior for 26 assessment items (56% girls, 5-6 years old a...
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Dynamic Measurement Modeling (DMM) is a recently-developed measurement framework for gauging developing constructs (e.g., learning capacity) that conventional single-timepoint tests cannot assess. The current project developed a person-specific DMM Trajectory Deviance Index (TDI) that captures the aberrance of an individual’s growth from the model-...
Article
A follow-up of a cluster-randomized trial evaluated the long-term impacts of a scale-up model composed of 10 research-based guidelines grounded in learning trajectories. Two treatment groups received the intervention during the prekindergarten year, and one of these groups received follow-through support in kindergarten and first grade. Business-as...
Article
Challenging but achievable math for young children: Learning and teaching with learning trajectories with LearningTrajectories.org
Chapter
The overall goal of the ISEE Assessment is to pool multi-disciplinary expertise on educational systems and reforms from a range of stakeholders in an open and inclusive manner, and to undertake a scientifically robust and evidence based assessment that can inform education policy-making at all levels and on all scales. Its aim is not to be policy p...
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The importance and complexity of young children's mathematical thinking and learning warrants high-quality, research-based resources that help teachers and caregivers understand and support children's development from birth through the primary grades. The authors discuss young children's potential to think mathematically, the criticality of early m...
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Although reformers have embraced learning trajectories (LT, also called learning progressions) as an important tool for improving mathematics education, the efficacy and assumptions of LT-based instruction are largely unproven. The aim of a recently completed research project was to fill this void. Fulfilling this aim was more challenging than many...
Article
Early childhood teachers face competing instructional priorities to support specific academic skills and general skills that underlie learning, such as executive function (EF) skills that allow children to control their own thinking and behavior. As the evidence shows, EF skills predict later mathematics achievement, and early mathematics predicts...
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Individual differences in the timing of developmental processes are often of interest in longitudinal studies, yet common statistical approaches to modeling change cannot directly estimate the timing of when change occurs. The time-to-criterion framework was recently developed to incorporate the timing of a prespecified criterion value; however, th...
Chapter
Young children in many US classrooms have limited opportunities to learn mathematics because their teachers are not well prepared. We developed a learning trajectories-based professional development (PD) approach that has shown large significant effects on early childhood teachers’ beliefs and practices, as well as these teachers’ positive effects...
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Educational researchers have long complained that practitioners do not use the available evidence, and practitioners in turn bemoan the lack of research that provides practical solutions. Decades ago, we asserted that learning trajectories could close that gap in two critical educational activities that depend fundamentally on teachers, and therefo...
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Psychometric work with young children faces the particular challenge that children’s attention spans are relatively short and, therefore, shorter assessments are required while retaining comprehensive coverage. This article reports on three empirical studies that encompass the development and validation of the Research-based Early Mathematics Asses...
Presentation
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In an international comparative study, the performance expectations in early mathematics in the field of "shapes and space” of qualified early childhood educators and students in Austria, German-speaking Switzerland, China (Shanghai), Vietnam (Hanoi) and the USA (Denver, CO) are examined using the example of construction games. The performance expe...
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We tested a specific theoretical assumption of a learning trajectories (LTs) approach to curriculum and teaching in the domain of early length measurement. Participating kindergartners (n = 189) were assigned to one of three conditions: LT, reverse-order (REV), or business-as-usual (BAU). LT and REV students received one-on-one instruction using th...
Chapter
There is a growing interest in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) education in the early years. We discuss two tendencies in this movement. The first is the addition of one or more domains, resulting in the acroynm STEAM (adding “Arts”) or STREAM (adding “Reading” as well). The second is the notion that the best approach to ST...
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Litkowski et al. compare preschoolers’ performance on three counting items to various standards. We clarify that the items Litkowski and colleagues found to be too easy for kindergarten were actually goals for 4s/PKs in the National Research Council’s report Mathematics Learning in Early Childhood: Paths Toward Excellence and Equity but that they w...
Article
We report on an innovative computer-adaptive assessment, the Comprehensive Research-based Early Math Ability Test (CREMAT), using the case of 1st- and 2nd-graders’ understanding of geometric measurement. CREMAT was developed with multiple aims in mind, including: (1) be administered with a reasonable number of items, (2) identify the level(s) of th...
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Young children in many US classrooms have limited opportunities to learn mathematics because their teachers are not well-prepared. The TRIAD model’s professional development has shown large significant effects on early childhood teachers’ beliefs and practice, as well as these teachers’ positive effects on children from low-resource communities, es...
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To determine whether scaling decisions might account for fadeout of impacts in early education interventions, we reanalyze data from a well-known early mathematics RCT intervention that showed substantial fadeout in the two years after the intervention ended. We examine how various order-preserving transformations of the scale affect the relative m...
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Measurement is a critical component of mathematics education, but research on the learning and teaching of measurement is limited. We previously introduced, refined, and validated a developmental progression – the cognitive core of a learning trajectory – for length measurement in the early years. A complete learning trajectory includes instruction...
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Several teaching moves have been suggested to support young children’s simple addition and subtraction performance, including use of a number path, directly modeling addition and subtraction, using mathematical symbols, and modifying problem difficulty. In the present study, teacher-researchers implemented an early arithmetic activity, Big Fish Sto...
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Researchers often develop instruments using correctness scores (and a variety of theories and techniques, such as Item Response Theory) for validation and scoring. Less frequently, observations of children’s strategies are incorporated into the design, development, and application of assessments. We conducted individual interviews of 833 prekinderg...
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Although basing instruction on a learning trajectory (LT) is often recommended, there is little evidence regarding a premise of a LT approach—that to be maximally meaningful, engaging, and effective, instruction is best presented 1 LT level beyond a child’s present level of thinking. We evaluated this hypothesis using an empirically validated LT fo...
Article
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Research on young children’s development of executive function (EF) and early mathematics has established relationships between the two, but studies have not investigated whether these relations differ for children with different outcomes in mathematics and EF, especially in the context of interventions. To examine the homogeneity of those relation...
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Research Findings: Educators declare their commitment to high-quality education for all children. Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) has been increasingly included as critical topics, even for young children. However, there are exceptions, especially the provision of developmentally appropriate STEM experiences to children wit...
Article
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Early education is replete with debates about “academic” versus “play” approaches. We evaluated 2 interventions, the Building Blocks (BB) mathematics curriculum and the BB synthesized with scaffolding of play to promote executive function (BBSEF), compared to a business-as-usual (BAU) control using a 3-armed cluster randomized trial with more than...
Article
Putting math and science at the center of children’s experiences, with a special focus on children using language and literacy as tools to learn and communicate information and to solve problems, creates a vibrant new approach to early education. We illustrate this approach with a unit that builds not just children’s STREAM skills, but also address...
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We present our findings with respect to our two research questions: 1) How well do children at the ICS and ARCS levels of the LT for area measurement estimate areas of rectangles and what is the nature of their estimates? And 2) To what extent can ICS and ARCS level children’s area estimation performance be quantitatively improved through targeted...
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Although basing instruction on a learning trajectory (LT) is often recommended, there is little direct evidence to support the premise of a “LT approach”—that to be maximally meaningful, engaging, and effective, instruction is best presented one LT level beyond a child’s present level of thinking. The present report serves to address the question:...
Article
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Strategic processes are a form of procedural knowledge in which a child knows how to enact a given strategy that improves their capability in problem solving or learning. The solution strategies children use are critical components of their learning, especially in mathematics. Children vary substantially in their knowledge and use of different stra...
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Perhaps more than at any other time in history, the development of mathematical skill is critical for the long-term success of students. Unfortunately, on average, U.S. students lag behind their peers in other developed countries on mathematics outcomes, and within the United States, an entrenched mathematics achievement gap exists between students...
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Connecting curriculum development and research benefits both. Those designing curricula should ensure that their work is scientifically based and evaluated. Those studying existing curricula should understand the ways in which they were developed and validated (or not) and that a comprehensive evaluation program involves more than final outcomes. W...
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Although basing instruction on learning trajectories (LTs) is often recommended, there is little direct evidence regarding the premise of a LT approach—that instruction should be presented (only) one LT level beyond a child’s present level. We evaluated this hypothesis in the domain of early shape composition. One group of preschoolers, who were at...
Article
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ResearchGate would not accept correct Journal...it is: Germeroth, C., Bodrova, E., Day-Hess, C. A., Barker, J., Sarama, J., Clements, D. H., & Layzer, C. (2019). Play it high, play it low: Examining the reliability and validity of a new observation tool to assess children’s make-believe play. American Journal of Play, 11(2), 183-221.
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Young children who struggle for any reason in learning mathematics need support and personal resources, both cognitive and emotional. For most children, executive function (EF) processes develop most quickly in the early childhood years (i.e., birth to third grade) and provide resources that allow children to control their own thinking and emotions...
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This chapter provides a rationale for early childhood mathematics instruction and recommendations for ensuring such instruction is effective, engaging, and holistic. It discusses how structured play, learning trajectories, and integrated instruction can be useful pedagogical tools in providing structured mathematical experiences that ensure educati...
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Approaches to standards, curriculum development, and teaching are diverse. However, increasingly learning trajectories are being used as a basis for each of these. In this chapter, we present our own definition and use of the construct, positing that learning trajectories can serve as one effective foundation for scientifically-validated mathematic...
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Most developers and publishers claim that their curricula are based on research, but few explicate their claims. In this chapter, we briefly assess the state of affairs regarding “research-based curricula” and present a model to mitigate weaknesses in the field that is based on coordinated interdisciplinary research ranging from cognitive science t...
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We define and describe how subitizing activity develops and relates to early quantifiers in mathematics. Subitizing is the direct perceptual apprehension and identification of the numerosity of a small group of items. Although subitizing is too often a neglected quantifier in educational practice, it has been extensively studied as a critical cogni...
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We respond to a call to analyze issues of curriculum standards and to present alternative storylines by addressing criticisms of the Common Core State Standards in early childhood. We describe a storyline from multiple media and evaluate this storyline's criticisms, focusing on the criticism that the standards are developmentally inappropriate. We...
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Although effective interventions have generated immediate positive effects on mathematics achievement, these effects often diminish over time, leading to the important question of what causes fadeout and persistence of intervention effects. This study investigates how children's forgetting contributes to fadeout and how transfer contributes to the...
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We examine the effects of 3 interventions designed to support Grades 2-5 children's growth in measuring rectangular regions in different ways. We employed the microge-netic method to observe and describe conceptual transitions and investigate how they may have been prompted by the interventions. We compared the interventions with respect to childre...
Technical Report
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In this brief, "STEM" is meant to include science, technology, engineering, and mathematics as individual disciplines and as the integration of those disciplines with each other. Because research in mathematics and science education is more extensive, these disciplines receive more attention in the brief. Science is the study of the natural world,...
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The fundamental question of whether preschool effects “fade” is hotly debated in arenas of theory, research, and policy. Few of these debates consider the role of transitions. Might it be that poor transitions are at least partly to blame? That is, if transitions are neglected, present educational contexts may be unintentionally aligned against the...
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Myths about early education abound. Many beliefs people hold about early math have a grain of truth in them, but as a whole are not true—they are largely myths. But the myths persist, and many harm children. In this article, we address ubiquitous math myths that may be negatively affecting many young students. We conclude that avoiding the myths an...