While there are many ways to collect information, students have trouble understanding how to employ various research methods effectively, since everyone learns and processes information differently. Instructing students on successfully using research methods is a continual challenge in education. The Handbook of Research on Students' Research Competence in Modern Educational Contexts is a scholarly resource that examines the critical analysis of the development of research competence in students. Featuring coverage on a broad range of topics, such as educational technologies, cognitive interest, and research capacity, this book is geared towards academicians, researchers, and students seeking current research on the development of research competence.

Governments and societies around the world strive to improve their education systems and ensure that all children and youths have the opportunity to go to school and acquire the knowledge and skills they need to lead healthy and productive lives. Key inputs to the education system, such as curricula, teachers, and education infrastructure, help to improve the quality of education. The quality of education infrastructure, specifically its appropriate educational planning and design with a focus on child development, has been widely discussed in recent years. The Sustainable Development Goals, which are defined by the United Nations and scope the development agenda for all countries in the world, require countries to build and upgrade education facilities that are child, disability and gender sensitive, and provide safe, non-violent, inclusive, and effective learning environments for all. Many stakeholders around the world are seeking evidence on how various learning settings may positively or negatively affect child development. The Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), Council of Europe Development Bank (CEB), and the World Bank are doing analytical work to answer the question of how to design schools that are efficient, inclusive, and conducive to learning. Moreover, the World Bank and other international financial institutions have large and diverse investment portfolios on school infrastructure in different parts of the world, amounting to billions of United States dollars. Therefore, there is a need for more evidence on the effectiveness of these educational infrastructure investments. The potential benefits of improving the spaces where education is provided can be sizeable, including energy savings, safer and healthier environments for children, and better learning outcomes.

The depth and breadth of a mathematics teacher's understanding of mathematics matter most as the teacher engages in the daily work of teaching. One of the major challenges to teachers is to be ready to draw on the relevant mathematical ideas from different areas of the school curriculum and from their postsecondary mathematics experiences that can be helpful in explaining ideas to students, making instructional decisions, creating examples, and engaging in other aspects of their daily work. Being mathematically ready and confident requires teachers to engage in ongoing professional learning that helps them to connect mathematics to events like those they live on a daily basis. The purpose of this volume is to provide teachers, teacher educators, and other facilitators of professional learning opportunities with examples of authentic events and tools for discussing those events in professional learning settings. The work shared in Facilitator's Guidebook for Use of Mathematics Situations in Professional Learning (Guidebook) resulted from a collaborative effort of school mathematics supervisors and university mathematics educators. The collaborators joined their varied experiences as teachers, coaches, supervisors, teacher educators, and researchers to suggest ways to scaffold activities, encourage discussion, and instigate reflection with teacher-participants of differing mathematics backgrounds and with varying teaching assignments. Each guide has ideas for engaging and furthering mathematical thought across a range of facilitator and participant mathematics backgrounds and draws on the collaborators' uses of the Situations with in-service and prospective teachers. The events and mathematical ideas connected to each event come from Situations in Mathematical Understanding for Secondary Teaching: A Framework and Classroom- Based Situations. A Situation is a description of a classroom-related event and the mathematics related to it. For each of six Situations, school and university collaborators developed a facilitator's guide that presents ideas and options for engaging teachers with the event and the mathematical ideas. The Guidebook also contains suggestions for how teachers and others might develop new Situations based on events from their own classrooms as a form of professional learning. Both teacher educators and school-based facilitators can use this volume to structure sessions and inspire ideas for professional learning activities that are rooted in the daily work of mathematics teachers and students.

This book provides authentic accounts of the effects of the revolutionary political reform experienced in the past half century on education in Europe's considerable rural hinterland. These reforms include the liberation of the Baltic and Eastern European states from Soviet communist domination, the 'eurozone' economic crises, and the current and future migration of people fleeing war and poverty from the Middle East and Africa. Overshadowing these events are so-called global forces which champion economies of scale and pressurize academic performance as keys to economic success. Trapped in this distal whirlwind of change are 1000s of small and/or rural elementary schools and the life chances of more 1000s of young children. The research presented here unveils the unseen and under-reported consequences of top-down, urban-oriented educational policies on children's and communities' experience of place and space. Exposure of these conditions in rural Europe is long overdue, but obscured for decades by political extremes of left and right. Yet, the lived reality of peremptory and swathing school closure programmes, and poverty inflicted on rural populations in parts of Eastern Europe is relatively unreported in the western educational literature - a situation exacerbated by the virtual invisibility of rural educational research generally. The chapters in this book reveal the insights of social science scholars from 11 European countries including those from low GDP, formerly soviet bloc countries, recently enabled to present their research at western European conferences such as the European Educational Research Association. Their research will inform and alert education academics, researchers and professionals to these rural European educational contexts. The research methodologies reported are diverse and innovative. The national context chapters are complemented by overview chapters which survey and synthesise (i)definitions and conceptualisations of rural, (ii) pan-European appraisal of educational, structural and geospatial statistics on small and rural schools, and (iii) identify key messages for better understanding of the rural situation in European research, policy and practice. Crucially, despite the gloom, the authors report positive strategies for rural school survival at governmental and/or school andcommunity levels, that include community involvement, rural educational tourism, and deliberative inter-community school network planning.

In this book, 37 international academics illustrate how authentic assessment is an effective measure of intellectual achievement as it requires the demonstration of deep understanding and complex problem solving through the performance of exemplary tasks. By exploring the concept of authentic assessment in both tertiary and school education, the authors in these chapters argue that authentic assessment is not only the measurement of significant intellectual accomplishments but also an important pedagogical structure. Authentic assessment is a concept more closely defined as an umbrella term that seeks to immerse learners in environments where they can gain highly practical and lifelong learning skills. Authentic assessment has been on the educational agenda for a number of years and keeps being a powerful tool for assessing students' 21st century competencies in the context of global educational reforms. Contributors are: Pinar Akyildiz, Fatma Nur Aktas, Chrysoula Arcoudis, Tasos Barkatsas, Michael Belcher, Antonios Bouras, Athina Chalkiadaki, Jere Confrey, Rebecca Cooper, Yuksel Dede, Paul Denny, Zara Ersozlu, Ivan Fortunato, Linda Hobbs, Marj Horne, Fragkiskos Kalavasis, Katerina Kasimatis, Belinda Kennedy, Gillian Kidman, Huk Yuen Law, Susan Ledger, Kathy Littlewood, Jiabo Liu, Michelle Ludecke, Tricia McLaughlin, Juanjo Mena, Andreas Moutsios-Rentzos, Greg Oates, Anastasia Papadopoulou, Fabiano Pereira dos Santos, Angela Rogers, Grainne Ryan, Rebecca Seah, Meetal Shah, Hazel Tan, Naomi Wilks-Smith, Dallas Wingrove, Qiaoping Zhang and Xiaolei Zhang.