In Consequential Learning, Jack Shelton speaks out about the disconnect between school systems and the communities around them. Today’s students enter their classrooms from a variety of backgrounds and communities, but their classroom education has relevance only inside school walls. Teachers can no longer view their students lives as beginning and ending with the school day. Shelton's concept of Consequential Learning recognizes that student’s learning takes place both in the classroom and in the community, and therefore suggests the development of pedagogies with ties to both students’ educations and the formation of their personal characters. By encouraging students to use classroom lessons to the benefit of their communities, the students learn critical thinking and judgement. Students become self-aware learners, a core value of Consequential Learning, developed by Shelton through work with the students, teachers, and community members of Alabama’s schools and colleges, as well as communities nation- and world-wide.

Student learning outcomes have emerged as a major issue for higher education in terms of accreditation, accountability, and performance indicators and performance funding. Student Learning Outcomes are measurable cognitive, psychomotor, or affective skills or knowledge acquired which embody the overarching goals of a course or program. Both course and programs have SLOs. Course SLOs should be aligned with the program SLOs for the program that the course belongs to. This handbook is intended to serve as a resource for Faculty, staff, academic leaders and educational developers engaged in program and course design/review, and the assessment of program-level learning outcomes for program improvement. Student learning should keep a sharp focus on differences in learning outcomes when studying the relationships between context, perceptions, and evaluations of context and approaches to learning.

This is an essential book for all those concerned with the field of assessment. It addresses relevant and timely conceptual and practical issues from a research perspective and, based on research results, clearly provides solutions to practical applications at the cutting edge of the emerging area of new modes of assessment. In a clear and rigorous manner, the authors explore new methods and study the various quality aspects of innovative approaches.

Praise for How Learning Works "How Learning Works is the perfect title for this excellent book. Drawing upon new research in psychology, education, and cognitive science, the authors have demystified a complex topic into clear explanations of seven powerful learning principles. Full of great ideas and practical suggestions, all based on solid research evidence, this book is essential reading for instructors at all levels who wish to improve their students' learning." —Barbara Gross Davis, assistant vice chancellor for educational development, University of California, Berkeley, and author, Tools for Teaching "This book is a must-read for every instructor, new or experienced. Although I have been teaching for almost thirty years, as I read this book I found myself resonating with many of its ideas, and I discovered new ways of thinking about teaching." —Eugenia T. Paulus, professor of chemistry, North Hennepin Community College, and 2008 U.S. Community Colleges Professor of the Year from The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Council for Advancement and Support of Education "Thank you Carnegie Mellon for making accessible what has previously been inaccessible to those of us who are not learning scientists. Your focus on the essence of learning combined with concrete examples of the daily challenges of teaching and clear tactical strategies for faculty to consider is a welcome work. I will recommend this book to all my colleagues." —Catherine M. Casserly, senior partner, The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching "As you read about each of the seven basic learning principles in this book, you will find advice that is grounded in learning theory, based on research evidence, relevant to college teaching, and easy to understand. The authors have extensive knowledge and experience in applying the science of learning to college teaching, and they graciously share it with you in this organized and readable book." —From the Foreword by Richard E. Mayer, professor of psychology, University of California, Santa Barbara; coauthor, e-Learning and the Science of Instruction; and author, Multimedia Learning

Place- and community-based education – an approach to teaching and learning that starts with the local – addresses two critical gaps in the experience of many children now growing up in the United States: contact with the natural world and contact with community. It offers a way to extend young people’s attention beyond the classroom to the world as it actually is, and to engage them in the process of devising solutions to the social and environmental problems they will confront as adults. This approach can increase students’ engagement with learning and enhance their academic achievement. Envisioned as a primer and guide for educators and members of the public interested in incorporating the local into schools in their own communities, this book explains the purpose and nature of place- and community-based education and provides multiple examples of its practice. The detailed descriptions of learning experiences set both within and beyond the classroom will help readers begin the process of advocating for or incorporating local content and experiences into their schools.

This book represents the emerging efforts of a growing international network of researchers and practitioners to promote the development and uptake of evidence-based pedagogies in higher education, at something a level approaching large-scale impact. By offering a communication venue that attracts and enhances much needed partnerships among practitioners and researchers in pedagogical innovation, we aim to change the conversation and focus on how we work and learn together – i.e. extending the implementation and knowledge of co–design methods. In this first edition of our Research Topic on Active Learning, we highlight two (of the three) types of publications we wish to promote. First are studies aimed at understanding the pedagogical designs developed by practitioners in their own practices by bringing to bear the theoretical lenses developed and tested in the education research community. These types of studies constitute the "practice pull" that we see as a necessary counterbalance to "knowledge push" in a more productive pedagogical innovation ecosystem based on research-practitioner partnerships. Second are studies empirically examining the implementations of evidence-based designs in naturalistic settings and under naturalistic conditions. Interestingly, the teams conducting these studies are already exemplars of partnerships between researchers and practitioners who are uniquely positioned as “in-betweens” straddling the two worlds. As a result, these publications represent both the rigours of research and the pragmatism of reflective practice. In forthcoming editions, we will add to this collection a third type of publication -- design profiles. These will present practitioner-developed pedagogical designs at varying levels of abstraction to be held to scrutiny amongst practitioners, instructional designers and researchers alike. We hope by bringing these types of studies together in an open access format that we may contribute to the development of new forms of practitioner-researcher interactions that promote co-design in pedagogical innovation.