Male preservice elementary teachers often receive special attention. However, identities consist of many complex components. Constant comparative methodology revealed emergent themes of privilege and disadvantage linked to gender, religion, and ethnicity in this exploratory examination of the stories of three male preservice elementary teachers. The men demonstrated varying awareness of their hybrid identities and associated privileges and disadvantages. The participants found privileges and disadvantages related to their gender, but members of religious and ethnic minority groups perceived significant disadvantages of those aspects of their identities. Findings suggest that preservice male teachers’ identities are more complex than gender alone, that being in multiple minority groups may compound challenges for preservice male teachers, and that teacher training alone may not sufficiently address issues of identity.

This study focused on 18 students 4–5 years old in an urban full-day preschool program in the Mid-Atlantic region of the United States. Over the course of a month, students used a touchscreen tablet to interact with Fingu, an app designed to develop students’ early number sense. Using backend data generated by the app, 8,153 individual task attempts were recorded. Multilevel growth modeling, with task attempts nested within students, was used to examine the extent to which students’ speed of response and response accuracy changed over the course of the study, as well as whether any individual characteristics were associated with either speed or accuracy. Results indicate that, on average, students become both faster and more accurate. Girls were also found to be more accurate than boys, and older students were found to be both slightly slower to respond and less accurate.