Volumes have been written about the value of more and better education. But is there sufficient evidence to support the commonly held belief that we, as individuals and as a community, should be investing more in education? This book explores that question in unprecedented detail, drawing on empirical evidence from an impressive array of sources. While much of the focus is on the educational system in the United Kingdom, the book offers lessons of international applicability. A state-of-the-art compendium on education policy and its impact on educational attainment, the book examines numerous large-scale data sources on individual pupils and schools. The questions the book considers are far-ranging: How much do teachers matter for children's educational attainment? What payoff do people get from acquiring more education when they enter the labor market? How well do education systems function to provide employers with the skills they want? The book concludes by issuing some strong policy recommendations and offering an evaluation of what does and does not work in improving educational attainment. The recommendations address such issues as school effectiveness, education financing, individual investment in education, government education initiatives, higher education, labor market rewards, and lifelong learning.
This textbook evolves from the intersection between ‘Research’, ‘Educational Information Technologies’ and recent ‘Best Practices’. It offers diplomacy and erudite rhetoric in order to harvest from innovation projects and see how new professional needs for teachers are emerging day by day. The volume launches the compact background for the 21st century education that every teacher faces after being in charge for 3 or 6 years after pre-service training. ‘Sources for a better education’ refers to the deep understanding and to the incentives for encouraging teachers to leave the comfort zone and experiment the next steps into a further sophisticated professionalism, without the threat of feeling in a ‘Dilemma’. The first candidate for extending one’s teaching effectiveness is to tailor one’s teaching to the test to be expected. ‘Teaching to the Test’ is an understandable tactic, however it endangers the students’ full understanding of underlying concepts and analogies. The second candidate for professionalism is the deeper layer of knowledge on how curricular domains are related. In simpler terms: better teachers know how to ‘bridge’ topics and subjects so that students develop a deeper understanding on the patterns and structure in knowledge. The 21st century education prioritizes higher degrees of flexible-, divergent and abstract thinking, so that creative problem solving comes into reach. ICT tools for making prior knowledge explicit is a major example on how learners harvest upon prior knowledge, thinking and intuition. The third source for a better education is the courage to envisage one’s meta knowledge in order to see patterns in learning and understanding. The more conscious prior knowledge gets decompiled into genetic metaphors; the better future learning can be anticipated. The fourth asset for meta-cognitive skills is the wide spectrum of tools that the web offers for building knowledge infra-structures so that knowledge becomes transformed into problem solving skills; the availability of knowledge is no longer sufficient for finding creative and authentic solutions in future situations. This is the case for both students and teachers. By tradition, the bottom-up strategy from reproductive factual learning up to the levels of problem solving and creative thinking has been favoured. The ‘one-click away’ access to information on the web asks a more strategic attitude from learners and practitioners to cope with the periphery between known and unknown, so that a more effective meta-cognition develops. The fifth stimulus for more effective learning is the expanding impact of social media. Social media tend to intimidate learners with incomplete understanding to jump on biases as delivered through political and conspiracy agendas. This books aims at the challenge to build upon learners’ existential needs and developing interest for a longer-term learning perspective. “Renaissance man and philosopher Piet Kommers presents us with an interesting question: What makes education exciting? His book covers a range of lessons learnt through research and practice, covering philosophies and paradoxes, ranging from learning to learn to machine learning for learning. In 35 chapters he takes us on an exciting, comprehensive journey of just about every conceivable aspect of technology and education. This is a must-have for every 21st Century bookshelf!” By: Johannes Cronjé, professor of Digital Teaching and Learning in the Department of Information Technology at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology, South Africa. “Piet Kommers has in 400 pages provided an overview of teaching based on practical experience. It is not a summary of pedagogic models, but a guide to important factors in how to motivate students and thus improve their learning. New technologies changes teaching, and we need to understand how application of such technologies can improve the learning. This book provides such knowledge and I wish I had it when I started teaching at university many years ago.” By: Jan Frick, Professor Business School, University of Stavanger, Norway. "Piet Kommers delivers a very thorough book with a holistic perspective on Learning Technologies. This book is a result of many years of experience that the author has in Higher Education. It comprises lessons learned from the author ́s professional career, including inputs from European Union research projects, as well as diversified interactions with a wide range of Peoples and Cultures. The result is a unique perspective that is a must-read for anyone interested in Learning Technologies, past, present, and future!" By: Pedro Isaias, associate professor at the Information Systems & Technology Management School of The University of New South Wales (UNSW – Sydney), Australia. “Distinguished Professor and Thinker Dr. Piet Kommers presents the academic community with a new horizon on education that reflects the current and future technology trends in the e-Learning and Fast Internet ubiquity. The Book discusses the current and most recent advances in research and application of most effective learning methods in conjunction with the future directions in machine learning in support of learning. The Book's 35 chapters present cutting-edge technologies and state-of-the-art learning methods in support of best educational practices and the student's best learning experience. The Book is most valuable asset to educator's community pursuing the mission of excellence in the Third Millennium!” By: Eduard Babulak, Professor, Computational Sciences, Liberty University, Lynchburg, USA. "Well-known scientist, (e-)learning expert and philosopher Piet Kommers presents us with an interesting question: What makes education exciting? His book covers a range of lessons learnt through research and practice, covering philosophies and paradoxes, ranging from ‘learning to learn’ to ‘machine learning for learning’. In 35 chapters he takes us on an exciting, comprehensive journey of just about every conceivable aspect of technology and education. This is an interesting and useful publication for all educators as well as learners and must-have for every 21st Century bookshelf!" By: Eugenia Smyrnova-Trybulska, Dr. hab., associate professor, Institute of Pedagogy, Faculty of Art and Sciences of Education, University of Silesia in Katowice, Poland. “The book presents a mosaic of assets reflecting the vast international experience in research and realization of learning technologies of the author, honourable professor of the UNESCO Chair in New information technologies in education for all, Piet Kommers. Describing various aspects of learning strategies, approaches, techniques and technologies in a concise way, he engages the readers into the mental construction of a "big picture" and makes them reconsider routine processes of teaching and learning. Exciting and thought-provoking reading for educators, researchers, and devoted learners.” By: professor Volodymyr Gritsenko, Director of the International Research and Training Centre for Information Technologies and Systems, National Academy of Sciences and Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine, Head of the UNESCO Chair.
Why we need to stop wasting public funds on education Despite being immensely popular—and immensely lucrative—education is grossly overrated. Now with a new afterword by Bryan Caplan, this explosive book argues that the primary function of education is not to enhance students' skills but to signal the qualities of a good employee. Learn why students hunt for easy As only to forget most of what they learn after the final exam, why decades of growing access to education have not resulted in better jobs for average workers, how employers reward workers for costly schooling they rarely ever use, and why cutting education spending is the best remedy. Romantic notions about education being "good for the soul" must yield to careful research and common sense—The Case against Education points the way.
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.
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.
Brings together over 40 selections of intellectual value - classic articles, book excerpts, and research studies - that have shaped the study of early childhood education and our contemporary understanding of it. This work organizes selections around major areas of study such as teaching, development, learning and instruction, and more.
Young adulthood - ages approximately 18 to 26 - is a critical period of development with long-lasting implications for a person's economic security, health and well-being. Young adults are key contributors to the nation's workforce and military services and, since many are parents, to the healthy development of the next generation. Although 'millennials' have received attention in the popular media in recent years, young adults are too rarely treated as a distinct population in policy, programs, and research. Instead, they are often grouped with adolescents or, more often, with all adults. Currently, the nation is experiencing economic restructuring, widening inequality, a rapidly rising ratio of older adults, and an increasingly diverse population. The possible transformative effects of these features make focus on young adults especially important. A systematic approach to understanding and responding to the unique circumstances and needs of today's young adults can help to pave the way to a more productive and equitable tomorrow for young adults in particular and our society at large. Investing in The Health and Well-Being of Young Adults describes what is meant by the term young adulthood, who young adults are, what they are doing, and what they need. This study recommends actions that nonprofit programs and federal, state, and local agencies can take to help young adults make a successful transition from adolescence to adulthood. According to this report, young adults should be considered as a separate group from adolescents and older adults. Investing in The Health and Well-Being of Young Adults makes the case that increased efforts to improve high school and college graduate rates and education and workforce development systems that are more closely tied to high-demand economic sectors will help this age group achieve greater opportunity and success. The report also discusses the health status of young adults and makes recommendations to develop evidence-based practices for young adults for medical and behavioral health, including preventions. What happens during the young adult years has profound implications for the rest of the life course, and the stability and progress of society at large depends on how any cohort of young adults fares as a whole. Investing in The Health and Well-Being of Young Adults will provide a roadmap to improving outcomes for this age group as they transition from adolescence to adulthood.
Developed by social studies specialists, this resource helps teachers turn classrooms into primary source learning environments. This engaging book offers effective, creative strategies for integrating primary source materials and providing cross-curricular ideas. This resource is aligned to the interdisciplinary themes from the Partnership for 21st Century Skills.
Praise for Liberating Learning "Moe and Chubb have delivered a truly stunning book, rich with the prospect of how technology is already revolutionizing learning in communities from Midland, Pennsylvania to Gurgaon, India. At the same time, this is a sobering telling of the realpolitik of education, a battle in which the status quo is well defended. But most of all, this book is a call to action, a call to unleash the power of technological innovation to create an education system worthy of our aspirations and our childrens' dreams." Ted Mitchell, CEO of the New Schools Venture Fund "As long as we continue to educate students without regard for the way the real world works, we will continue to limit their choices. In Liberating Learning, Terry Moe and John Chubb push us to ask the questions we should be asking, to have the hard conversations about how far technology can go to advance student achievement in this country." Michelle Rhee, Chancellor of Education for the Washington, D.C. schools "A brilliant analysis of how technology is destined to transform America's schools for the better: not simply by generating new ways of learning, but also and surprisingly by unleashing forces that weaken its political opponents and open up the political process to educational change. A provocative, entirely novel vision of the future of American education." Rick Hanushek, the Paul and Jean Hanna Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University "Terry Moe and John Chubb, two long-time, astute observers of educational reform, see technology as the way to reverse decades of failed efforts. Technology will facilitate significantly more individualized student learning and perhaps most importantly, technology will make it harder and harder for the entrenched adult interests to block the reforms that are right for our kids. This is a provocative, informative and, ultimately, optimistic read, something we badly need in public education." Joel Klein, Chancellor of the New York City schools
