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.

This work looks at why many of America's schools are failing and relates how parents, activists, and education reformers are joining together to fix a system that works for adults but consistently fails the children it is meant to educate. In it the author takes a look at the adults who are fighting over America's failure to educate its children, and points the way to reversing that failure.

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.

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.

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.

Discusses how school choice, misapplied standards of accountability, the No Child Left Behind mandate, and the use of a corporate model have all led to a decline in public education and presents arguments for a return to strong neighborhood schools and quality teaching.