Susan Groundwater-Smith is one of the most influential voices in the world of educational practitioner inquiry. The convener in Australia of the Coalition of Knowledge Building Schools, she is a staunch advocate of innovative methods of practitioner inquiry with a particular emphasis upon student voice and the use of images in capturing young people’s perspectives on their learning experience. So it is more than fitting that this unique text on practitioner inquiry and teacher professional learning is dedicated to her. Rethinking Education Practice Through Reflexive Inquiry is a compilation of essays that explore contemporary issues in practitioner inquiry and action research from the perspective of both university-based and school-based authors. The essays discuss the practical, political and theoretical dimensions of practitioner inquiry, advancing the argument that the adoption of an inquiring approach to practice is both an integral dimension of teachers’ work in the modern school as well as critical to effective and authentic professional learning. And the essays draw on the work of Groundwater-Smith to demonstrate the benefits brought to bear on schools, teachers and learners when the complex nature of the relationship between inquiry and practice is understood and acted upon in pursuit of democratic knowledge interests.

Assessment is a value-laden activity surrounded by debates about academic standards, preparing students for employment, measuring quality and providing incentives. There is substantial evidence that assessment, rather than teaching, has the major influence on students’ learning. It directs attention to what is important and acts as an incentive for study. This book revisits assessment in higher education, examining it from the point of view of what assessment does and can do and argues that assessment should be seen as an act of informing judgement and proposes a way of integrating teaching, learning and assessment to better prepare students for a lifetime of learning. It is essential reading for practitioners and policy makers in higher education institutions in different countries, as well as for educational development and institutional research practitioners.

Research with human subjects has long been controversial because of the conflicts that often arise between promoting scientific knowledge and protecting the rights and welfare of subjects. Twenty-five years ago the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research addressed these conflicts. The result was the Belmont Report: Ethical Principles and Guidance for Research Involving Human Subjects, a report that identified foundational principles for ethical research with human subjects: respect for persons, beneficence, and justice. Since the publication of Belmont, these three principles have greatly influenced discussions of research with human subjects. While they are often regarded as the single-most influential set of guidelines for biomedical research and practice in the United States (and other parts of the world), not everyone agrees that they provide adequate guidance. Belmont Revisited brings together a stellar group of scholars in bioethics to revisit the findings of that original report. Their responses constitute a broad overview of the development of the Belmont Report and the extent of its influence, especially on governmental commissions, as well as an assessment of its virtues and shortcomings. Belmont Revisited looks back to reexamine the creation and influence of the Belmont Report, and also looks forward to the future of research—with a strong call to rethink how institutions and investigators can conduct research more ethically.

A central debate about the description of auxiliary selection concerns the regularity of auxiliary selection from a typological perspective. Thus, studies of auxiliary selection have both stressed the fact that certain recurrent parameters are highly relevant to the description of auxiliary selection, whereas other studies demonstrate significant differences in auxiliary selection systems. By integrating the synchronic and diachronic levels of linguistic description, the papers in the present volume work towards a framework that explains these contradictory findings. They discuss the role of semantic and syntactic constraints in gradient auxiliary selection, address the question of paradigmaticity of the have-be alternation, and shed light on the mechanisms of the gradual historical change from be- to have-selection. The volume thus puts forth a row of innovative theoretical and empirical findings from a wide range of typologically diverse European languages that substantially broaden our knowledge about the mechanisms of auxiliary selection systems.

Knowledge building aims to transform schools into learning communities and bring knowledge creation into schools. The book therefore elaborates on how learning, technology, and assessment can be aligned both online and offline to facilitate such a process. Adopting a quasi-experimental design and drawing on rich data from forum discussions, questionnaires, interviews, learning outcomes, and classroom presentations, this book shows that the knowledge building environment, augmented by reflective assessment and principles, helped Chinese students to develop a deeper approach to learning, improved academic performance, and promoted collective knowledge advances. The book also discusses the potentials and challenges of designing technology-supported, assessment- and principle-based learning environments in tertiary contexts, especially when deep learning and knowledge building capacity are greatly emphasised in the knowledge era. The book will be of interest to scholars and educators working in learning sciences and computer-supported collaborative learning.

This book draws on the perspectives of non-migrants and urban youth in Bamenda, in the Northwest region of Cameroon, as well as on the views of Cameroonian migrants in Switzerland, to explore the meaning and role of New Media in the negotiation of sociality in transnational migration. New Media facilitated connectedness serve as a privileged lens through which Cameroonians, home and away, scrutinise and mediate sociality. In this rich ethnography, Bettina Frei describes how the internet and mobile phones are adopted by migrants and their non-migrant counterparts in order to maintain transnational relationships, and how the specific medialities of these communication technologies in turn impact on transnational sociality. Contrary to popular presumptions that New Media are experienced as mainly connecting and enabling, this study reveals that in a transnational context in particular, New Media serve to mediate tensions in transnational social ties. The expectations of being connected go hand in hand with an awareness of social and geographical distance and separation.

This text seeks to revisit major theories of motivation and learning in order to evaluate the relevance of each theory to our complex educational environments. The chapters are written by the renowned authors of theories, or authors who have critiqued theories.