This book highlights recent developments in literacy research in science teaching and learning from countries such as Australia, Brazil, China, Finland, Germany, Hong Kong, New Zealand, Norway, Singapore, Spain, South Africa, Sweden, Taiwan, and the United States. It includes multiple topics and perspectives on the role of literacy in enhancing science teaching and learning, such as the struggles faced by students in science literacy learning, case studies and evaluations of classroom-based interventions, and the challenges encountered in the science classrooms. It offers a critical and comprehensive investigation on numerous emerging themes in the area of literacy and science education, including disciplinary literacy, scientific literacy, classroom discourse, multimodality, language and representations of science, and content and language integrated learning (CLIL). The diversity of views and research contexts in this volume presents a useful introductory handbook for academics, researchers, and graduate students working in this specialized niche area. With a wealth of instructional ideas and innovations, it is also highly relevant for teachers and teacher educators seeking to improve science teaching and learning through the use of literacy.

Part of the well-known Staff and Educational Development Series, this practice oriented book brings together leading research and evaluation approaches and supporting case studies from leading educational researchers and innovative teachers. With much emphasis on change, innovation and developing best practice in higher education, it is essential that those involved in actually developing, researching or implementing approaches to teaching, learning or management, are informed by the experiences of others. The emphasis of this book is on changing practice in HE; how developments come about; what research underpins desirable development; and the impact of development of student learning, staff expertise and institutional practice and policy. Specifically, the book is developed in two themed parts: Part A, Supporting change within subjects and departments. Part B, Supporting change within institutions and the wider environment.

Those who operate in physics education frequently ask research operators for suggestions, reference models, updated content and answers for their professional work. So far, the sector has not achieved significant advances specifically in terms of both content updates and methodology approaches. In the special issue, titled New Trends in Physics Education Research, the authors, in addition to presenting some new topics in physics education, take into account the greater relevance that in recent years the Evidence Based Education has taken place. In this framework, the main points of issue include: 1) Dealing with new trends in teaching and learning processes in physics; highlighting new mathematics content for physics courses; 3) giving evidence of the key role played by laboratory activities in physics training courses; and 4) stressing the importance of interdisciplinary approaches as well as scientific culture, communication and dissemination. Physics teaching involves several fields and different disciplines (such as mathematics, philosophy, laboratory activities, etc.) where the same arguments are often explained without clarifying that often there is a close correlation between disciplines. In particular, an integrated theoretical and experimental approach can improve the knowledge of some subjects of physics and mathematics; furthermore, it is also useful to employ a joint approach with laboratory activities, and by doing so enriching topics of meaning. In such cases, mathematics provides the adapt tools for physics and also is able to drive physical intuition; on the other hand, physics and its laboratory activities provide simple access to mathematical topics of complex comprehension. The issue is addressed to academics and schoolteachers as well as researchers in the field of physics education.

While the general agreement in education remains that the more senses involved in learning, the better we learn; the question still remains as to the distinction between the education of children and the education of adults. Handbook of Research on Teaching and Learning in K-20 Education provides well-rounded research in providing teaching and learning theories that can be applied to both adults and children while acknowledging the difference between both. This book serves as a comprehensive collection of expertise, research, skill, and experiences which will be useful to educators, scholars, and practitioners in the K-12 education, higher education, and adult education field.

Every year, the World Bank’s World Development Report (WDR) features a topic of central importance to global development. The 2018 WDR—LEARNING to Realize Education’s Promise—is the first ever devoted entirely to education. And the time is right: education has long been critical to human welfare, but it is even more so in a time of rapid economic and social change. The best way to equip children and youth for the future is to make their learning the center of all efforts to promote education. The 2018 WDR explores four main themes: First, education’s promise: education is a powerful instrument for eradicating poverty and promoting shared prosperity, but fulfilling its potential requires better policies—both within and outside the education system. Second, the need to shine a light on learning: despite gains in access to education, recent learning assessments reveal that many young people around the world, especially those who are poor or marginalized, are leaving school unequipped with even the foundational skills they need for life. At the same time, internationally comparable learning assessments show that skills in many middle-income countries lag far behind what those countries aspire to. And too often these shortcomings are hidden—so as a first step to tackling this learning crisis, it is essential to shine a light on it by assessing student learning better. Third, how to make schools work for all learners: research on areas such as brain science, pedagogical innovations, and school management has identified interventions that promote learning by ensuring that learners are prepared, teachers are both skilled and motivated, and other inputs support the teacher-learner relationship. Fourth, how to make systems work for learning: achieving learning throughout an education system requires more than just scaling up effective interventions. Countries must also overcome technical and political barriers by deploying salient metrics for mobilizing actors and tracking progress, building coalitions for learning, and taking an adaptive approach to reform.

Whether it is earning a GED, a particular skill, or technical topic for a career, taking classes of interest, or even returning to begin a degree program or completing it, adult learning encompasses those beyond the traditional university age seeking out education. This type of education could be considered non-traditional as it goes beyond the typical educational path and develops learners that are self-initiated and focused on personal development in the form of gaining some sort of education. Essentially, it is a voluntary choice of learning throughout life for personal and professional development. While there is often a large focus towards K-12 and higher education, it is important that research also focuses on the developing trends, technologies, and techniques for providing adult education along with understanding lifelong learners’ choices, developments, and needs. The Research Anthology on Adult Education and the Development of Lifelong Learners focuses specifically on adult education and the best practices, services, and educational environments and methods for both the teaching and learning of adults. This spans further into the understanding of what it means to be a lifelong learner and how to develop adults who want to voluntarily contribute to their own development by enhancing their education level or knowledge of certain topics. This book is essential for teachers and professors, course instructors, business professionals, school administrators, practitioners, researchers, academicians, and students interested in the latest advancements in adult education and lifelong learning.

In this revolutionary book, a renowned computer scientist explains the importance of teaching children the basics of computing and how it can prepare them to succeed in the ever-evolving tech world. Computers have completely changed the way we teach children. We have Mindstorms to thank for that. In this book, pioneering computer scientist Seymour Papert uses the invention of LOGO, the first child-friendly programming language, to make the case for the value of teaching children with computers. Papert argues that children are more than capable of mastering computers, and that teaching computational processes like de-bugging in the classroom can change the way we learn everything else. He also shows that schools saturated with technology can actually improve socialization and interaction among students and between students and teachers. Technology changes every day, but the basic ways that computers can help us learn remain. For thousands of teachers and parents who have sought creative ways to help children learn with computers, Mindstorms is their bible.

Traditional classrooms are fast becoming a minority in the education field. As technologies continue to develop as a pervasive aspect of modern society, educators must be trained to meet the demands and opportunities afforded by this technology-rich landscape. The Handbook of Research on Teacher Education in the Digital Age focuses on the needs of teachers as they redesign their curricula and lessons to incorporate new technological tools. Including theoretical frameworks, empirical research, and best practices, this book serves as a guide for researchers, educators, and faculty and professional developers of distance learning tools.

As a field, education has largely failed to learn from experience. Time after time, promising education reforms fall short of their goals and are abandoned as other promising ideas take their place. In Learning to Improve, the authors argue for a new approach. Rather than “implementing fast and learning slow,” they believe educators should adopt a more rigorous approach to improvement that allows the field to “learn fast to implement well.” Using ideas borrowed from improvement science, the authors show how a process of disciplined inquiry can be combined with the use of networks to identify, adapt, and successfully scale up promising interventions in education. Organized around six core principles, the book shows how “networked improvement communities” can bring together researchers and practitioners to accelerate learning in key areas of education. Examples include efforts to address the high rates of failure among students in community college remedial math courses and strategies for improving feedback to novice teachers. Learning to Improve offers a new paradigm for research and development in education that promises to be a powerful driver of improvement for the nation’s schools and colleges.

This book focuses on international research in statistics education, providing a solid understanding of the challenges in learning statistics. It presents the teaching and learning of statistics in various contexts, including designed settings for young children, students in formal schooling, tertiary level students, and teacher professional development. The book describes research on what to teach and platforms for delivering content (curriculum), strategies on how to teach for deep understanding, and includes several chapters on developing conceptual understanding (pedagogy and technology), teacher knowledge and beliefs, and the challenges teachers and students face when they solve statistical problems (reasoning and thinking). This new research in the field offers critical insights for college instructors, classroom teachers, curriculum designers, researchers in mathematics and statistics education as well as policy makers and newcomers to the field of statistics education. Statistics has become one of the key areas of study in the modern world of information and big data. The dramatic increase in demand for learning statistics in all disciplines is accompanied by tremendous growth in research in statistics education. Increasingly, countries are teaching more quantitative reasoning and statistics at lower and lower grade levels within mathematics, science and across many content areas. Research has revealed the many challenges in helping learners develop statistical literacy, reasoning, and thinking, and new curricula and technology tools show promise in facilitating the achievement of these desired outcomes.