This book aims to extend the educational literacy of student teachers. It will enable them to deconstruct policy, research and media texts and place them within historical, social and literary contexts.

Stats, stats, stats. It seems everything written about education today is full of stats. With this book, nimble-minded number cruncher and award-winning researcher Gerald Bracey takes your hand and walks you through the process of figuring out the meaning behind the figures. You don't need to be a math whiz to follow Bracey because he writes with clarity and humor, explicitly defining statistical terminology in easy-to-understand language and even offering you thirty-two specific principles for assessing the quality of research as you read it.

If you’re studying education much of what you do is informed by educational research but how do you interpret it effectively? How do you judge whether results are valid or relevant? This is the perfect guide to engaging with educational research. It explores how to read journal articles critically; what key academic terms really mean; different approaches to educational research, how they are used and what they aim to uncover, and how high quality findings can be meaningful for teaching and learning. Supported by examples that demonstrate the use (and misuse) of research in education, this is your essential guide to understanding and effectively using research.

The Science of Reading: A Handbook brings together state-of-the-art reviews of reading research from leading names in the field, to create a highly authoritative, multidisciplinary overview of contemporary knowledge about reading and related skills. Provides comprehensive coverage of the subject, including theoretical approaches, reading processes, stage models of reading, cross-linguistic studies of reading, reading difficulties, the biology of reading, and reading instruction Divided into seven sections:Word Recognition Processes in Reading; Learning to Read and Spell; Reading Comprehension; Reading in Different Languages; Disorders of Reading and Spelling; Biological Bases of Reading; Teaching Reading Edited by well-respected senior figures in the field

Understanding Education Research, 2nd Edition is designed to help students learn to read educational research articles carefully, systematically, and critically. Readers will learn how to categorize titles, decode abstracts, find research questions, characterize research arguments, break down methods and procedures, explore references, apply analysis strategies, and interpret findings. This textbook and quick reference guide allows students to easily develop the skills they need to become research literate and the 2nd edition has been updated throughout to offer simple guidelines for qualitative, quantitative, and statistical approaches and up-to-date information on complex and confusing methodologies.

Text comprehension is a critical area of psychological and educational research, and has particular relevance to educational context. The general aim of this international volume Reading Comprehension in Educational Settings is to encourage excellence in research and to bring together teachers, students, researchers and other professionals from different disciplines (e.g. psychology, linguistics, neuroscience, education, information technology, and communication), as well as all those members of the general public who have an interest in the study of reading. The specific objectives of the different chapters in this volume are to analyze existing methods of studying the various aspects of reading comprehension, disseminate results already obtained by research groups working in the field and debate current and future trends in the study of reading.

In Why Knowledge Matters, E. D. Hirsch, Jr., presents evidence from cognitive science, sociology, and education history to further the argument for a knowledge-based elementary curriculum. Influential scholar Hirsch, author of The Knowledge Deficit, asserts that a carefully planned curriculum that imparts communal knowledge is essential in achieving one of the most fundamental aims and objectives of education: preparing students for lifelong success. Hirsch examines historical and contemporary evidence from the United States and other nations, including France, and affirms that a knowledge-based approach has improved both achievement and equity in schools where it has been instituted. In contrast, educational change of the past several decades in the United States has endorsed a skills-based approach, founded on, Hirsch points out, many incorrect assumptions about child development and how children learn. He recommends new policies that are better aligned with our current understanding of neuroscience, developmental psychology, and social science. The book focuses on six persistent problems that merit the attention of contemporary education reform: the over-testing of students in the name of educational accountability; the scapegoating of teachers; the fadeout of preschool gains; the narrowing of the curriculum to crowd out history, geography, science, literature, and the arts; the achievement gap between demographic groups; and the reliance on standards, such as the Common Core State Standards, that are not linked to a rigorous curriculum. Why Knowledge Matters makes a clear case for educational innovation and introduces a new generation of American educators to Hirsch’s astute and passionate analysis.