The adoption of setting in the primary school (pupils ability grouped across classes for particular subjects) emerged during the 1990s as a means to raise standards. Recent research based on 8875 children in the Millennium Cohort Study showed that 25.8% of children in Year 2 were set for literacy and mathematics and a further 11.2% of children…

Children's success in learning to read in the first grade is crucial for their ultimate success in schooling. This study aimed at identifying self-declared practices in preschool and first grade in Spain and contrasting these practices with the official recommendations for the initial teaching of reading and writing. A characterisation of the ways…

This paper studies the process of learning to write from an insider perspective, by adopting the framework of implicit theories of learning. We interviewed 160 children attending kindergarten or primary education in public schools in Argentina (20 children from each of the eight grades from kindergarten to seventh grade). Main questions explored…