Connecting Research and Practice for Educational Improvement presents powerful arguments and richly illustrated cases for how more collaborative relationships between researchers and educators can yield more relevant research that impacts practice. This book can be useful for anyone teaching or learning about research–practice partnerships, in both school and out-of-school settings. The chapters highlight the different dispositions and skills needed to cultivate ethical relationships and promote equity through partnerships and provide rich frameworks for guiding future work.

Ensuring doctoral students receive a well-rounded and thorough education is critical for their future success. Service learning within the doctoral program is one of the many aspects that helps shape students’ experiences and prepares them for life after graduation. Co-Constructing and Sustaining Service Learning in Graduate Programs: Reflections from the Field captures the experiences of doctoral students who were involved in socially just and sustainable service-learning projects and what it meant for them to be engaged in scholarship through service-learning. The book also illustrates what service-learning looks like and should look like in higher education particularly given the inequities that exist in the field of education. Covering key topics such as online education, academic identity, and sustainable learning, this reference work is ideal for administrators, policymakers, researchers, scholars, practitioners, instructors, and students.

A multifaceted approach will be needed to fix the often-unsustainable challenges faced in the 21st-century academic arena. The trends in public and private institutions of education are more cutbacks, downsizing, mergers, sequestrations, lean process implementations, and the increase in hiring part-time workers over full-time workers. At the same time, the COVID-19 pandemic has brought with it an array of schooling challenges around organizational change. Some challenges are structural, some are political, some are human resources related, and yet others are symbolic. To fix these problems, there is a need to address a core issue: increasing student engagement. This requires a wholesale rethinking of what schooling can be. Multifaceted Analysis of Sustainable Strategies and Tactics in Education brings increased awareness to students seeking education and faculty navigating the politics regarding the challenges they face, awareness of the disempowered voices found in the halls of these institutions, and light to the challenges facing administration in education. Covering topics such as parental involvement, work-based learning, and academic success, this premier reference source is an essential resource for educators and administrators of both K-12 and higher education, pre-service teachers, teacher educators, government officials, librarians, researchers, and academicians.

Building substantially on the earlier, landmark text, What Works? (Policy Press, 2000), this book brings together key thinkers and researchers to provide a contemporary review of the aspirations and realities of evidence-informed policy and practice. The text is clearly structured and provides sector-by-sector analysis of evidence use in policy-making and service delivery. It considers some cross-cutting themes, including a section of international commentaries, and concludes by looking at lessons from the past and prospects for the future. This book will be of interest to a wide range of social science researchers, students and practitioners as well as those interested in supporting more evidence-informed policy and practice.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is one of the United States' leading federal science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) agencies and plays an important role in the landscape of STEM education. In 2015, NASA's Science Mission Directorate (SMD) created the Science Activation (SciAct) program to increase the overall coherence of SMD's education efforts, to support more effective, sustainable, and efficient use of SMD science discoveries for education, and to enable NASA scientists and engineers to engage more effectively and efficiently in the STEM learning environment with learners of all ages. SciAct is now transitioning into its second round of funding, and it is beneficial to review the program's portfolio and identify opportunities for improvement. NASA's Science Activation Program: Achievements and Opportunities assesses SciAct's efforts towards meeting its goals. The key objectives of SciAct are to enable STEM education, improve U.S. scientific literacy, advance national education goals, and leverage efforts through partnerships. This report describes and assesses the history, current status, and vision of the program and its projects. It also provides recommendations to enhance NASA's efforts through the SciAct program.

"Although there are a few other titles related to project based learning in ELA, they are no books that focus specifically on the ways that the design principles of project based learning, universal design for learning, and social and emotional learning can be used to anchor an ELA curriculum and the learning experiences that students engage in throughout the school year. Other PBL books focus almost exclusively on implementing and designing PBL Projects, whereas this book centers around a set of design principles that can be used to teach existing projects (which we share), to create new ones, or to create authentic learning experiences that are project enhanced. Our book brings PBL to life through classroom vignettes and teacher and student voices. Whether you are new to PBL or a PBL veteran, this book provides classroom resources that facilitate customization to educator's unique instructional contexts. We share ideas for developing teacher communities that hold a space for collaborating around PBL practices and that revitalize teachers and teaching"--

This volume explores the impact of research?practice partnerships in education (broadly conceived) on communities in which such partnerships operate. By invitation, some of the partnerships celebrated in this volume are firmly established, while others are more embryonic; some directly engage community members, while others are nurtured in and by supportive communities. Collectively, however, the eleven chapters constitute a range of compelling instances of knowledge utilization (knowledge mobilization), and offer a counter?narrative to the stereotypical divide between researchers and practitioners. Educational researchers and educational practitioners reside in and are both politically supported and socially sustained by their local communities. The nesting of researchers’ and practitioners’ collaborative decision?making and action in the financial, social, organizational, and political contexts of the community—together with the intended and unintended outcomes of those decisions and actions—speaks to the essence of community impact in the context of this volume.

That there is a divide between research and practice is a common lament across policy-oriented disciplines, and education is no exception. Rhetoric abounds about the role research plays (or does not play) in the improvement of schools and classrooms, and policy makers push solutions that are rooted in assumptions about the way that research should influence practice. Yet few people have studied the relationship between research and practice empirically. This book presents findings from a series of interlocking case studies of nationally visible R&D projects, with a unique focus on how researchers and practitioners actually worked together, and the policy, social, and institutional processes that either enabled or hindered their work. The book investigates the dynamics of cross-institutional collaboration and the relationship between tool design, teacher learning, and the implementation of research-based approaches. It also explores conditions for learning in schools and the role of evidence in district decision making. By investigating the roles played by research and practice in these ten educational improvement efforts, the book illuminates lessons for those who seek to do this kind of work in the future. It concludes by suggesting implications for designers, funders, school and district leaders, and universities.

Synthesizing the best current knowledge about early literacy, this comprehensive handbook brings together leading researchers from multiple disciplines. The volume identifies the instructional methods and areas of focus shown to be most effective for promoting young children's (PreK–2) growth in reading, writing, oral language, and the connections among them. In 33 chapters, the Handbook covers conceptual foundations; development and instruction of both code- and meaning-related literacy skills; professional development and family engagement; supporting equity across populations; and learning beyond traditional boundaries, including digital and out-of-school contexts. Highlighted throughout are issues around access to high-quality instruction, working with multilingual populations, and data-based decision making and interventions.

Edited by a diverse group of expert collaborators, the Handbook of the Cultural Foundations of Learning is a landmark volume that brings together cutting-edge research examining learning as entailing inherently cultural processes. Conceptualizing culture as both a set of social practices and connected to learner identities, the chapters synthesize contemporary research in elaborating a new vision of the cultural nature of learning, moving beyond summary to reshape the field toward studies that situate culture in the learning sciences alongside equity of educational processes and outcomes. With the recent increased focus on culture and equity within the educational research community, this volume presents a comprehensive, innovative treatment of what has become one of the field’s most timely and relevant topics.