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9 references
Bandura presents an agentic account in which people help shape their circumstances rather than merely react to environmental forces.
Human agency rests on intentionality, forethought, self-reactiveness, and self-reflectiveness: people form plans, anticipate consequences, regulate action, and examine their own functioning. Agency can be exercised personally, by proxy through others, or collectively through coordinated effort. Social cognitive theory avoids treating agency and social structure as opposites; people create social systems that subsequently enable and constrain action. The article also places agency within biological, cultural, and technological coevolution.
For educators, the account supports learning environments in which students set meaningful goals, select and monitor strategies, reflect on consequences, and experience collective efficacy, while recognising that agency always operates through opportunities and constraints in the surrounding system.
This interdisciplinary edited volume examines uncertainty as both a condition for and a catalyst of creativity, learning, and development.
Contributors address how not knowing can produce discomfort or rigidity but can also create doubt, curiosity, exploration, reflection, and possibilities for change. Chapters consider emotion, self-regulation, mindfulness, play, scientific and mathematical sensemaking, childhood development, intellectual character, and creators' self-concepts. The collection avoids treating uncertainty as automatically beneficial: outcomes depend on how people interpret it, whether action seems possible, and what social and educational supports are available. For educators, the volume suggests designing bounded encounters with uncertainty in which learners can ask questions, test ideas, receive guidance, and revise interpretations.
Productive uncertainty is challenging enough to invite inquiry while remaining psychologically safe and connected to useful knowledge and strategies.
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Bereiter and Scardamalia challenge views of expertise as simply accumulated knowledge, automatic skill, or exceptional talent.
Their central idea is progressive problem solving: accomplished people reinvest the mental resources released by experience into redefining tasks, noticing deeper problems, and extending what they can do. Routine experts use efficiency to make work easier; adaptive or advancing experts seek more demanding goals and continue learning at the edge of competence. The authors draw across domains to examine pattern recognition, tacit and explicit knowledge, self-regulation, promisingness judgments, and the social conditions that support expertise. For educators, the account shifts attention from accelerating novices toward polished performance to cultivating habits of inquiry, reflection, and reinvestment.
Learners need strong foundations, but also opportunities to identify worthwhile problems, improve methods, and treat competence as a platform for further growth.
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Black and Wiliam review research on classroom formative assessment and find consistent evidence that strengthening feedback processes can improve learning. Assessment becomes formative when evidence about understanding is used to adapt teaching and learning, not simply when a task is labelled informal or frequent.
The review examines teacher questioning, feedback, self-assessment, peer processes, mastery learning, and the effects of grades and comparison. Productive feedback helps learners recognise a goal, compare their current state with it, and take action to close the gap. Students' beliefs, motivation, and active role are therefore central. The authors also stress that implementation demands substantial changes in classroom practice.
For educators, the review supports eliciting thinking, interpreting evidence, giving information that guides next steps, and involving students in criteria and self-regulation rather than relying on marks or praise alone.
Black and Wiliam develop a theoretical account that places formative assessment inside a broader model of pedagogy.
They define practice as formative when evidence about student achievement is elicited, interpreted, and used by teachers, learners, or peers to make better-grounded decisions about next steps than they could make without that evidence. The article connects classroom interaction with theories of instruction, feedback, self-regulation, and the regulation of learning. It identifies key strategies: clarifying intentions and criteria, engineering discussions and tasks that reveal understanding, providing feedback that moves learning forward, activating students as resources for one another, and activating them as owners of learning.
For educators, the theory shifts attention from assessment instruments to decision processes: who needs evidence, what inference it supports, and how the resulting action changes the course of learning.
This multidisciplinary handbook surveys theories, methods, and applications of self-regulation across educational, developmental, personality, clinical, health, and organisational psychology.
Chapters address goal setting, motivation, attention, emotion, metacognition, volition, social and environmental influences, individual differences, development, measurement, and interventions. The collection shows that self-regulation is not a single skill or stable trait: it involves interacting systems that generate standards, monitor progress, manage thoughts and feelings, select action, and respond to feedback. It also examines failures of regulation and the conditions under which control can be learned or supported.
For educators, the handbook provides conceptual tools for distinguishing cognitive strategy knowledge from motivation and implementation, selecting measures that match a theory, and designing support for goals, monitoring, strategy adaptation, emotional regulation, and persistence rather than expecting learners to regulate independently without instruction or context.
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Boelens, De Wever, and Voet systematically review 20 studies to identify instructional responses to four recurring challenges in blended learning: incorporating flexibility, stimulating interaction, facilitating learning processes, and fostering an affective learning climate.
Designs often allowed choice of place or pace but gave learners little control over how the blend itself was organised. Social interaction was commonly initiated face to face, while online activities were used for personalisation and monitoring. Support for planning, progress, and feedback appeared more often than deliberate work on belonging, emotion, or psychological safety. The review shows that combining online and classroom components does not automatically integrate their strengths.
For educators and designers, it recommends making choices purposeful, connecting interaction across modes, scaffolding self-regulation, monitoring progress, and attending explicitly to motivation and climate throughout the whole learning experience.
Brookhart presents feedback as information that helps students understand a learning goal, judge their current work, and decide what to do next.
Effective feedback is timely enough to be used, specific without doing the thinking for the learner, and expressed in language the student can understand. It should focus on the task, the process used, or productive self-regulation rather than praise, comparison, or fixed personal qualities. The second edition examines feedback at several scales: individual oral and written comments, an episode of learning in which students act on information, and longer-term effects on learning and motivation. For educators, the book recommends matching amount and mode to the learner and task, describing strengths and a manageable next step, and building immediate opportunities for revision.
Feedback succeeds only when students interpret and use it to extend learning.
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Carpenter, Pan, and Butler review two well-supported learning strategies: spacing study over time and retrieving information from memory.
Both strengthen long-term learning across ages, content areas, and educational settings, yet learners often underuse them because massed study and rereading feel fluent and produce faster short-term gains. The authors examine mechanisms, boundary conditions, combinations with feedback and elaboration, and evidence from laboratories and classrooms. Spacing requires deciding how learning episodes are distributed; retrieval practice requires attempting recall rather than merely re-exposing oneself to material. Desirable difficulty can make effective study feel less successful while it is occurring, complicating self-regulation.
For educators, the review supports revisiting important ideas after delays, embedding frequent low-stakes recall, varying questions and contexts, correcting errors, and explaining why effortful practice is useful so students can make better independent study decisions.
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Each entry identifies the volume, edition, chapter or appendix in which the work appears.
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References are checked against publisher records, scholarly indexes, DOI or ISBN metadata, repositories and author records where available. An entry marked [Citation not verified] preserves the wording found in the relevant volume without attributing findings to an unconfirmed work.
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