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117 references
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- Vol 7 RE: Chapter 8, App D
emergency remote teachinghigher educationonline learningstudent engagementtechnology accessinstitutional responsestudent well-beingcomparative research designsJournal article Evidence summaryAt a glance
Bond and colleagues map 282 empirical studies of emergency remote teaching in higher education during the first global COVID-19 semester.
Key ideas
The literature was produced rapidly and was dominated by descriptive, cross-sectional work, student self-reports, undergraduate samples, and research from particular national and disciplinary contexts. Studies addressed experiences, engagement, access, technology, assessment, communication, well-being, and institutional responses, but robust longitudinal or comparative designs were limited. The review distinguishes emergency remote teaching—an improvised response to crisis—from intentionally designed online learning, preventing conclusions about online education from being drawn from emergency conditions.
Why it matters
For educators and leaders, the map highlights the importance of access, clear communication, interaction, workload, teacher support, and student well-being, while urging cautious interpretation of early findings and stronger research designs for understanding which adaptations should endure.
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- Vol 4 RE: Chapter 18
self-directed learninglearner autonomyteacher facilitationinstructional scaffoldinggoal settingresource evaluationreflective practicelearner agencyJournal article Evidence summaryAt a glance
Botha, du Toit-Brits, and Blignaut synthesise theoretical perspectives on self-directed learning and the changing role of teachers.
Key ideas
Self-directed learners diagnose needs, formulate goals, identify resources, choose and implement strategies, and evaluate outcomes, but this agency develops through supportive educational relationships rather than teacher absence. The article discusses motivation, creativity, adaptability, learner diversity, digital contexts, and the capabilities teachers need to create environments that gradually transfer responsibility. Teachers act as designers, facilitators, models, coaches, and providers of feedback while ensuring that learners have sufficient knowledge and structure to make productive choices.
Why it matters
For educators, the review recommends explicit instruction in goal setting, planning, resource evaluation, monitoring, and reflection; meaningful choice within clear expectations; responsive scaffolding; and assessment practices that help students become increasingly capable of directing future learning.
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- Vol 5 RE: Chapter 15
sustainable assessmentformative assessmentself-regulated learningevaluative judgementfeedback literacyassessment designself-assessmentcalibrationJournal article Evidence summaryAt a glance
Boud and Soler revisit sustainable assessment: assessment designed not only to support current coursework but also to develop learners' capacity to meet future learning demands.
Key ideas
Reviewing how the idea evolved over fifteen years, they connect it with formative assessment, self-regulation, feedback, and students' ability to make informed judgements about the quality of their own work. Sustainable practice cannot depend indefinitely on teachers supplying corrective information; learners need opportunities to interpret standards, compare work with criteria, seek and use feedback, and calibrate their decisions. The authors argue that these capacities must be built across a programme rather than attached to isolated tasks.
Why it matters
For educators, the article recommends examining how assessment design contributes to long-term learning, creating repeated opportunities for evaluative judgement, and aligning present requirements with the kinds of decisions students will later make independently.
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- Vol 4 RE: Chapter 12
social-emotional learningemotional intelligenceemotion regulationschoolwide implementationteacher professional learningschool climateemotional competencetheory of changeJournal article Evidence summaryAt a glance
Brackett and colleagues describe RULER as a theory-driven, schoolwide approach that integrates social, emotional, and academic learning rather than treating emotional skills as a stand-alone lesson.
Key ideas
The framework is grounded in emotional-intelligence theory and organizes learning around recognizing, understanding, labeling, expressing, and regulating emotion. Implementation includes professional learning for adults, shared tools and routines, classroom instruction, and practices intended to influence relationships and school climate. The authors explain how emotions affect attention, memory, decision-making, health, and the quality of teaching and learning, making adult competence and organizational support central to the model. They also review the program’s theory of change and available evidence while identifying questions for further research and implementation.
Why it matters
For educators, the article’s main implication is systemic: durable social-emotional learning requires common language, repeated practice, supportive leadership, and alignment across classrooms and the wider school, rather than isolated activities delivered only to students.
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- Vol 4 RE: Chapters 21, 24, App C
emotional intelligenceemotion perceptionemotion regulationemotional understandingacademic experiencesocial functioningperformance-based assessmentmeasurement validityJournal article Evidence summaryAt a glance
Brackett, Rivers, and Salovey review emotional intelligence as a set of abilities for perceiving emotion, using emotion to support thought, understanding emotional information, and regulating emotion.
Key ideas
They distinguish this ability model and its performance-based measures from broader mixed or trait conceptions that combine personality, motivation, and social qualities. The review considers evidence linking emotional intelligence with personal well-being, relationships, social functioning, academic experience, and workplace performance, while noting measurement and causal limitations in the literature. Emotionally intelligent action involves integrating feeling with reasoning rather than treating the two as opposites. For educators, the article offers a framework for helping learners identify and interpret emotions, understand how feelings influence attention and decisions, and practise regulation strategies.
Why it matters
It also cautions that claims about emotional intelligence should be evaluated against the definition and assessment method actually used.
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- Vol 7 RE: Chapter 4
educational videoscognitive load managementvideo segmentationsignalingactive learningretrieval practicelearner engagementinstructional designJournal article Evidence summaryAt a glance
Brame synthesises research into three requirements for effective educational video: manage cognitive load, sustain student engagement, and promote active learning. To manage limited working-memory capacity, videos can use signalling to highlight essential information, segment content into learner-controlled chunks, remove decorative material, and coordinate spoken explanation with relevant visuals.
Key ideas
Engagement improves when videos are concise, conversational, enthusiastic, and visibly connected to the course. Watching alone, however, can create an illusion of understanding. Guiding questions, embedded prompts, interactive controls, and assignments that require retrieval or application help students process the material actively. The article treats video as an instructional design problem rather than a recording format.
Why it matters
For educators, its practical message is to clarify the learning goal, eliminate avoidable load, keep each segment purposeful, and pair viewing with an activity that makes learners recall, explain, predict, or use what they have seen.
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- Vol 1 TE: App A
- Vol 2 RE: Chapters 1, 2, 5, 6, 8, App A, App D
- Vol 2 TE: App B
- Vol 4 RE: Chapter 10
- Vol 4 TE: Chi, M. T. H. (2009). Active-constructive-interactive: A conceptual framework for differentiating learning activities. Topics in Cognitive Science, 1(1), 73–105
- Vol 5 RE: Chapters 1, 3, 5, 7, 9
prior knowledgeconceptual understandingknowledge transfermetacognitionformative assessmentlearner-centered environmentsknowledge-centered environmentslearning communitiesBook Evidence summaryAt a glance
This National Research Council synthesis connects findings about cognition, development, neuroscience, and classroom learning. It describes expertise as organised, conceptually connected knowledge that supports recognition and transfer, not simply a larger store of facts.
Key ideas
Learners enter instruction with prior knowledge and beliefs that shape new understanding; teaching must therefore elicit and work with existing conceptions. Metacognitive approaches help students plan, monitor, and revise their learning. The book characterises effective environments as learner-centred, knowledge-centred, assessment-centred, and community-centred, with these dimensions designed coherently. It also examines children’s learning, brain development, teacher learning, and educational technology.
Why it matters
For educators, the synthesis supports building deep disciplinary structures, making thinking visible through formative assessment, cultivating metacognition, and designing supportive communities in which knowledge can be applied beyond the original lesson.
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- Vol 7 RE: Chapter 8
self-regulated learningonline higher educationtime managementmetacognitioneffort regulationcritical thinkingpeer learningacademic achievementJournal article Evidence summaryAt a glance
Broadbent and Poon systematically review studies linking self-regulated learning strategies with achievement in fully online higher education. Twelve studies met their criteria.
Key ideas
Time management, metacognition, effort regulation, and critical thinking showed the most consistent positive relationships with academic outcomes; rehearsal, elaboration, and organisation had weaker support. Peer learning showed a moderate positive association, but its confidence interval included zero. The authors caution that the small and varied evidence base limits firm causal conclusions and that relationships found in face-to-face settings may be weaker online. For educators and course designers, the review highlights the need to make planning, monitoring, persistence, and time use visible and teachable rather than assuming online learners will regulate themselves.
Why it matters
It also points toward designing prompts, schedules, progress cues, and support that help students sustain productive strategies.
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- Vol 5 RE: Chapter 9
rubric designformative assessmentperformance criteriaperformance descriptorsanalytic rubricsholistic rubricsself-assessmentgrading practicesBook Evidence summaryAt a glance
Brookhart explains rubrics as coherent sets of criteria accompanied by descriptions of performance quality.
Key ideas
Effective criteria represent the learning students should demonstrate, not incidental features of the task, while performance-level descriptions show a meaningful continuum rather than vague labels or point counts. The book distinguishes analytic from holistic rubrics and general from task-specific rubrics, showing how each serves different instructional and grading purposes. It addresses constructing, revising, and using rubrics with students for feedback, self-assessment, goal setting, and grading. Poor rubrics can fragment quality or reward compliance; well-designed ones focus attention on important learning.
Why it matters
For educators, the guidance recommends beginning with the intended learning, selecting observable criteria, describing genuine differences in quality, testing the rubric against student work, and involving learners so the tool supports judgement and improvement instead of merely calculating scores.
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- Vol 5 RE: Chapter 10
- Vol 5 TE: App C
formative feedbackfeedback timingfeedback specificitytask-focused feedbackprocess-focused feedbackself-regulationstudent revisionfeedback useBook Evidence summaryAt a glance
Brookhart presents feedback as information that helps students understand a learning goal, judge their current work, and decide what to do next.
Key ideas
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.
Why it matters
Feedback succeeds only when students interpret and use it to extend learning.
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- Vol 6 RE: Chapters 7, 9, App D, App E
evidence use in schoolsresearch engagementstaff evidence capacityprofessional dialogueschool improvement culturelocally identified problemsBook Evidence summaryAt a glance
Brown's edited practitioner volume examines how schools can engage with and generate research evidence without treating research use as a simple act of distributing findings.
Key ideas
Contributors include teachers, researchers, journalists, policy advisers, and professional-development specialists, bringing complementary and sometimes conflicting perspectives to the practical and ethical questions involved. Chapters use overviews, cases, resource boxes, and take-away messages to help time-pressed leaders assess what is relevant. The book emphasises building staff capacity to find and interpret evidence, connecting evidence with locally identified problems, creating routines for professional dialogue, and developing a culture in which claims can be questioned. It also recognises constraints such as workload, access, relevance, and organisational priorities.
Why it matters
For school leaders, the central implication is to make evidence engagement a supported collective practice with time, structures, expertise, and follow-through rather than an additional individual expectation.
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- Vol 6 RE: Chapters 7, 9, 10, 11, 12, 14, App D
professional learning networkscollaborative inquiryteacher design teamsknowledge mobilisationnetwork leadershipboundary crossingnetwork sustainabilityBook Evidence summaryAt a glance
Brown and Poortman's edited volume examines professional learning networks as structures for teacher development and school and system improvement.
Key ideas
International cases include research-learning networks, teacher design teams, data teams, lesson study, communities of pedagogical inquiry, interschool networks, and system-wide educational landscapes. Across these forms, productive networks do more than connect people: they create purposeful inquiry, generate and circulate knowledge, give participants agency, and link collaboration to changes in practice. The chapters also address leadership, evidence use, relationships, boundary crossing, impact, and long-term sustainability. Networks can fail when participation is superficial, purposes are unclear, knowledge remains local, or support disappears.
Why it matters
For educators and system leaders, the collection recommends establishing a shared improvement focus, creating routines for disciplined collaborative inquiry, attending to trust and facilitation, and evaluating whether network activity changes professional knowledge, classroom practice, and learner outcomes.
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- Vol 3 RE: Chapter 1, App A
- Vol 3 TE: App C
cultural meaning-makingnarrative learninglearner agencyconstructivist pedagogymetacognitioninstitutional participationeducational identityBook Evidence summaryAt a glance
Bruner argues that education cannot be understood apart from culture because human minds develop through shared systems of meaning, language, narrative, tools, and social interaction.
Key ideas
The essays challenge views of learning as the isolated acquisition of information and examine how schooling distributes agency, constructs identity, and inducts learners into ways of interpreting the world. Bruner develops postulates concerning perspective, constraints, constructivism, interaction, externalisation, instrumentalism, institutional life, identity, and narrative. He considers folk pedagogy, collaboration, metacognition, the teaching of the past, and the place of stories in organising experience. Education both reproduces culture and offers a forum for renegotiating it.
Why it matters
For educators, the book supports treating learners as active meaning-makers, making assumptions and perspectives discussable, using dialogue and narrative, connecting school knowledge with cultural life, and recognising how institutional arrangements shape participation and possibility.
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- Vol 1 RE: Chapter 11
- Vol 4 RE: Chapter 1
- Vol 4 TE: App C
spiral curriculumdisciplinary structuresdevelopmentally appropriate representationdiscovery learningintuitive thinkingcurriculum sequencingconceptual understandingBook Evidence summaryAt a glance
Bruner's classic argument for curriculum reform proposes that the fundamental structure of any subject can be taught in an intellectually honest form at any stage of development when representation and support are appropriate.
Key ideas
Learning should organise facts around powerful principles so that knowledge becomes understandable, memorable, and transferable. A spiral curriculum revisits central ideas repeatedly, each time at a more complex or formal level, rather than treating topics as finished after one encounter. Bruner also examines intuitive thinking, motivation, readiness, and the role of teaching aids. The claim is not that every version of a topic suits every learner, but that curriculum designers can represent important ideas in developmentally accessible ways and progressively refine them.
Why it matters
For educators, the book supports identifying generative disciplinary concepts, sequencing repeated encounters, connecting new detail to prior structure, encouraging conjecture and discovery, and balancing intuitive insight with increasingly explicit analysis.
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- Vol 6 RE: Chapter 6
relational trustschool improvementprofessional integritypersonal regardorganisational cooperationinstructional leadershipcollective risk-takingBook Evidence summaryAt a glance
Drawing on case studies, interviews, surveys, and longitudinal achievement data from Chicago elementary schools, Bryk and Schneider describe relational trust as an organisational resource for improvement.
Key ideas
Trust grows through repeated exchanges among principals, teachers, students, and parents and rests on perceived respect, competence in core responsibilities, personal regard, and integrity. It does not remove disagreement or guarantee successful reform; it makes people more willing to take risks, share problems, cooperate, and sustain difficult collective work. Schools with strong relational trust were more likely to adopt coherent changes and improve academically, while persistently weak trust constrained improvement. Leadership practices and stable, respectful social relations help build the resource.
Why it matters
For educators and leaders, the findings recommend attending to how decisions are made, whether commitments are honoured, how competence is supported, and whether people experience genuine consideration alongside technical improvement strategies.
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- Vol 6 RE: Chapters 1, 3, 7, 9, 11, App A, App B, App D, App E
- Vol 7 RE: Chapter 14, App D
improvement sciencepractical measurementdriver diagramsplan-do-study-act cyclessystems thinkingnetworked improvement communitiesvariation analysisBook Evidence summaryAt a glance
Bryk and colleagues translate improvement science into an approach for addressing persistent educational problems.
Key ideas
They organise the work around six principles: make the problem specific and user-centred; attend to variation in performance; see the system producing current outcomes; measure what matters for improvement; use disciplined inquiry to learn rapidly; and accelerate learning through networked communities. The book introduces tools such as process maps, driver diagrams, practical measures, and plan-do-study-act cycles. It distinguishes improvement work from implementing a favoured solution at scale: teams first need to understand local mechanisms, test changes under varied conditions, and accumulate reliable knowledge about what works, for whom, and where.
Why it matters
For educators and leaders, the approach recommends starting with a clearly defined problem, involving people who experience the system, testing small changes, studying failures as information, and coordinating learning across sites before claiming broad success.
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- Vol 4 RE: Chapter 9
- Vol 4 TE: App C
- Vol 5 RE: Chapters 1, 3, 5, 6, 10, 15, App A
- Vol 5 TE: App C
self-regulated learningfeedback interpretationmetacognitive monitoringinternal feedbackexternal feedbackfeedback effectslearning strategiesJournal article Evidence summaryAt a glance
Butler and Winne integrate research on feedback with a cognitive model of self-regulated learning.
Key ideas
Learners interpret tasks using knowledge, beliefs, goals, and motivational conditions; select tactics and strategies; generate products; and monitor the relationship between their current state and internal standards. Monitoring creates internal feedback, while external feedback from teachers, peers, or tasks can confirm, challenge, or supplement those judgements. Because learners filter feedback through prior beliefs and knowledge, information does not automatically produce improvement and may prompt changes to goals, strategies, effort, or understanding. The synthesis places monitoring at the centre of recursive engagement and explains why feedback effects vary with task and learner.
Why it matters
For educators, it suggests designing feedback that helps students compare work with criteria, diagnose causes, select strategies, and monitor subsequent performance, while explicitly developing the knowledge and beliefs required to interpret feedback productively.
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- Vol 3 RE: Chapter 13
classroom spatial designone-to-one technologylearning space affordancespedagogical ecologyflexible classroom layoutstechnology-supported learningquasi-experimental designJournal article Evidence summaryAt a glance
Byers, Hartnell-Young, and Imms investigate how classroom layout influences students' perceptions of one-to-one digital technology in a secondary school.
Key ideas
Using a quasi-experimental single-subject research design, they compare the same learners' experiences in traditional classrooms and new-generation learning spaces, helping separate spatial effects from differences between groups. Students reported changes in how frequently, effectively, and valuably technology supported learning when teaching occurred in the more flexible environment. The study argues that devices and spaces operate as part of a pedagogical ecology: changing furniture or adding technology does not itself guarantee different learning, but spatial affordances can enable interaction, movement, visibility, and teaching practices that make technology more useful.
Why it matters
For educators and designers, the findings support evaluating space, pedagogy, and technology together, observing actual use, and preparing teachers and students to exploit flexible arrangements rather than assuming the architecture will produce innovation automatically.
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- Vol 6 RE: Chapter 8, App D
lesson studycollaborative teacher learningresearch lessonspupil observationlesson redesignevidence-informed pedagogyinstructional facilitationJournal article Evidence summaryAt a glance
Cajkler and colleagues examine lesson study as collaborative professional learning in a secondary school.
Key ideas
Teacher groups jointly identified a learning issue, planned a research lesson, observed pupils closely, discussed evidence, and revised the lesson. The process shifted attention from evaluating an individual teacher toward investigating how learners responded to particular pedagogical choices. Participants valued the structured dialogue, shared responsibility, exposure to colleagues' thinking, and opportunity to connect observation with lesson redesign. The study also identifies practical and cultural challenges, including time, unfamiliarity with close observation, and the need for facilitation that protects inquiry from becoming judgemental.
Why it matters
For school leaders and teachers, the findings support using lesson study as a repeated evidence-informed cycle, selecting a focused learner problem, assigning observers to collect relevant evidence, and making post-lesson discussion an analysis of learning rather than a performance review.
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- Vol 2 RE: Chapter 11
- Vol 4 RE: Chapter 12
- Vol 5 RE: Chapters 4, 5, 8
student feedback literacyevaluative judgementfeedback uptakepeer feedbackexemplar analysisemotional feedback responsesrevision opportunitiesJournal article Evidence summaryAt a glance
Carless and Boud define student feedback literacy as the understandings, capacities, and dispositions needed to interpret information and use it to improve work or learning strategies.
Key ideas
Their framework has four connected features: appreciating feedback as an active process, developing evaluative judgement, managing emotional responses, and taking action. Barriers arise when feedback is treated as comments delivered by teachers, when students cannot recognise quality, when criticism threatens identity, or when course design provides no opportunity to use information. The authors illustrate development through analysing exemplars and participating in peer feedback, activities that allow students to compare work, discuss criteria, and practise judgement.
Why it matters
For educators, the paper recommends embedding feedback literacy in curriculum and assessment sequences, coaching students in productive participation, and ensuring that feedback leads to a consequential opportunity for revision or future application.
A transparent research trail
More than a bibliography.
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Evidence summaries explain the central idea and why the source matters to educators.
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Entries link to lawful full text where available, or to a publisher, library or purchase page.
Edition abbreviations
- TE
- Teacher Edition
- PE
- Practice Edition
- RE
- Research Edition
Citation checks
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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