Offers advice for teachers on overcoming student apathy, discussing different types of students, such as rebels, socialites, the overwhelmed, and players, and providing tips for helping them succeed academically.

Overcoming Student Apathy: Motivating Students for Academic Success provides a candid look into the hearts and minds of many of today's struggling students. Frustrated teachers and administrators typically stop at labeling the symptoms shown by these students: apathy, low motivation, laziness. Overcoming Student Apathy clarifies the situation, while proposing tips to rise to the challenge. Apathy plagues many of today's middle and high school classrooms, and the problem will not spontaneously disappear. Teachers must be willing to move beyond the 'they don't care' attitude to discover how we can eradicate this nemesis to learning. Overcoming Student Apathy guides the reader toward success with the disenfranchised, the downtrodden, the devalued, and the demoralized. Eight archetypes are used in narrative form to represent the various forms that apathy assumes in our classrooms (e.g., The Rebel, The Downtrodden, The Invisible). Teachers will identify with both the students and the teachers portrayed in the book; thus, transferring understanding and applications back to their own classrooms.

Overcoming Student Apathy: Succeeding with All Learners provides a candid look into the hearts and minds of many of today’s struggling learners. Frustrated teachers and administrators typically stop at labeling the symptoms shown by these students: apathetic, unmotivated, lazy. Overcoming Student Apathy clarifies the issues, while proposing solutions to move forward with each student. The second edition has added three additional chapters that focus on critical issues surrounding today’s learners: a look at keystone habits that influence student behavior, addressing standards that frame learning and technologies that can accent learning, and creating highly engaged learning environments to achieve success with all. Undoubtedly apathy currently plagues many of our middle and high school classrooms. This book starts the conversation on how to move beyond “they just don’t care” by focusing on solutions that help to eradicate this nemesis to learning.

Some educational practices have contributed to the apathy of students. These include a perceptual view of behavior, the view that self-worth equals achievement, norm-referenced evaluation, and success as ability and effort. Four strategies which have the potential for allowing students to experience success from reasonable levels of effort include: (1) individual goal-setting structures that allow students to define their own criteria for success; (2) outcome-based instruction and evaluation which make it possible for slower students to experience success without having to compete with faster students; (3) attribution retraining which can help apathetic students view failure as a lack of effort rather than a lack of ability; and (4) cooperative learning activities which help students realize that personal effort can contribute to group as well as individual goals. Educators must confront the discrepancies between the actual and stated goals of education. Students have the power to choose how much effort to expend on any task. If the goal is to differentiate students according to their ability, then slower students will choose to reject school by avoiding effort. For those students who are forced to choose between rejecting schooling or rejecting their sense of self-worth, time is short. (ABL)

Grade level: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, p, e, i, s, t.

Over the past century, educational psychologists and researchers have posited many theories to explain how individuals learn, i.e. how they acquire, organize and deploy knowledge and skills. The 20th century can be considered the century of psychology on learning and related fields of interest (such as motivation, cognition, metacognition etc.) and it is fascinating to see the various mainstreams of learning, remembered and forgotten over the 20th century and note that basic assumptions of early theories survived several paradigm shifts of psychology and epistemology. Beyond folk psychology and its naïve theories of learning, psychological learning theories can be grouped into some basic categories, such as behaviorist learning theories, connectionist learning theories, cognitive learning theories, constructivist learning theories, and social learning theories. Learning theories are not limited to psychology and related fields of interest but rather we can find the topic of learning in various disciplines, such as philosophy and epistemology, education, information science, biology, and – as a result of the emergence of computer technologies – especially also in the field of computer sciences and artificial intelligence. As a consequence, machine learning struck a chord in the 1980s and became an important field of the learning sciences in general. As the learning sciences became more specialized and complex, the various fields of interest were widely spread and separated from each other; as a consequence, even presently, there is no comprehensive overview of the sciences of learning or the central theoretical concepts and vocabulary on which researchers rely. The Encyclopedia of the Sciences of Learning provides an up-to-date, broad and authoritative coverage of the specific terms mostly used in the sciences of learning and its related fields, including relevant areas of instruction, pedagogy, cognitive sciences, and especially machine learning and knowledge engineering. This modern compendium will be an indispensable source of information for scientists, educators, engineers, and technical staff active in all fields of learning. More specifically, the Encyclopedia provides fast access to the most relevant theoretical terms provides up-to-date, broad and authoritative coverage of the most important theories within the various fields of the learning sciences and adjacent sciences and communication technologies; supplies clear and precise explanations of the theoretical terms, cross-references to related entries and up-to-date references to important research and publications. The Encyclopedia also contains biographical entries of individuals who have substantially contributed to the sciences of learning; the entries are written by a distinguished panel of researchers in the various fields of the learning sciences.

The middle school years are a maze of academic duties, human growth and self-development, discovering self identity, and increasing social interaction with other people. This maze can be an adventure of achievement and opportunity, or it can be a struggle of difficulty and disappointment. As these experiences are the impetus or foundation for many later achievements in academics, careers, and personal life, it is imperative that educators maximize these formative years by helping middle school students successfully travel through this maze despite its ups and downs, its twists and turns, and its new challenges to master and the old issues to resolve. For instance, educators must support students who have fallen behind, so as to thwart their reduced likelihood of turnaround in high school. Likewise, educators must challenge exceptional students, in order to perpetuate their enthusiasm for learning and prepare them for college studies. By discussing the comprehensive roles and duties of school administrators, counselors, and teachers, The Power of Middle School addresses how to maximize middle school curriculum and extra-curricular activities for the academic, personal, and professional benefits of all students.

Assessment for Teaching is a comprehensive and practical introduction to assessment and learning in primary and secondary school settings. This book treats assessment as a source of data that informs teaching strategies. It replaces a deficit model of assessment with a development model: a framework which recognises the importance of identifying what the student is ready to learn. The book also promotes collaboration between teachers in professional learning teams - encouraging the sharing of assessment data and team-based interpretation - to improve student outcomes and to plan goals for students based on a development scale. Each chapter contains: • an exercise for applying the course content to classroom practice • a response template for the exercise • guidelines on assessing the value of the exercise in a professional learning team • a short test for participants to cross-check their understanding of the course content. This is an essential resource for both pre-service and in-service teachers.