How gains from early childhood experiences are initiated, increased, sustained, and affect life-course development are fundamental to science and society. They also have increasing policy relevance, given public investments in early learning programs and the need to measure their effectiveness in promoting well-being. With contributions from leading researchers across many disciplines, this book emphasizes key interventions and practices over the first decade of life and the elements and strategies through which gains can be enhanced by schools, families, communities, and public institutions. Three critical themes are addressed: firstly, the importance of documenting and understanding the impact of investments in early childhood and school-age years. Secondly, increased priority on elements and principles for scaling effective programs and practices to benefit all children. Thirdly, a focus on multiple levels of strategies for sustaining gains and promoting long-term effects, ranging from early care and family engagement to school reform, state, and federal policy.

"A practical primer par excellence for teachers who want to implement the principles of Reuven Feuerstein's Mediated Learning Experience. A multitude of easy-to-implement suggestions empowers teachers to transform even the most challenged students into more effective thinkers and learners." -James Bellanca, Chief Executive Officer International Renewal Institute, Inc. "Teachers are often told to improve students' problem-solving abilities. This is a book that explains HOW, teaching the practitioner to recognize dysfunctions in cognition and providing strategies to help students become independent learners." -Lauren Mittermann, Social Studies Teacher Gibraltar Middle School, Fish Creek, WI Develop your students' abilities to think and learn more effectively! All individuals have the potential to change and learn. Using Reuven Feuerstein's theory that educators can enhance intelligence and change the way students think with the right kind of intervention, the authors provide teachers and counselors with practical strategies to help at-risk students develop cognitive skills and become more effective thinkers and learners. In the second edition, readers will find an expanded discussion of mediated learning, explanations and applications of the Cognitive Map and Structured Cognitive Modifiability, and reflective activities for the educator. Through case studies and in-depth coverage of metacognition, metalearning, metateaching, and metatasking, this user-friendly resource shows educators how they can: Analyze learners' cognitive skills Modify tasks to advance learning Promote the use of effective thinking skills Encourage autonomous learning Mediated Learning, Second Edition, offers highly effective intervention techniques to increase student motivation, improve students' problem-solving skills, and strengthen their thinking processes.

In the past 20 years, neuroimaging has provided us with a wealth of data regarding human memory. However, to what extent can neuroimaging constrain, support or falsify psychological theories of memory? To what degree is research on the biological bases of memory actually guided by psychological theory?
In looking at the close interaction between neuroimaging research and psychological theories of human memory, this book presents a state-of-the-art exploration of imaging research on human memory, along with accounts of the significance of these findings with regard to fundamental psychological questions. The book starts with a summary of some of the conceptual problems we face in understanding neuroimaging data. It then looks at the four areas of human memory research that have been most intensively studied with modern brain imaging tools - Learning and consolidation, Working memory control processes and storage, Long-term memory representations, and Retrieval control processes. Throughout, the book shows how brain imaging methods, such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and electroencephalography (EEG), can help us increase our knowledge of how human memory is organized, how memory representations are stored, consolidated and retrieved, and how access to memory contents is controlled. With all chapters written by leading researchers in the field, the book will be essential for all those interested in the psychology and neuroscience of memory.

The cognitive and neural sciences have been on the brink of a paradigm shift for over a decade now. The traditional information-processing framework in psychology, with its computer metaphor of the mind, is still considered to be the mainstream approach. However, the dynamical-systems perspective on mental activity is now receiving a more rigorous treatment, allowing it to move beyond the trendy buzzwords that have become associated with it. The Continuity of Mind will help to galvanize the forces of dynamical systems theory, cognitive and computational neuroscience, connectionism, and ecological psychology that are needed to complete this paradigm shift.
In this book, Michael Spivey lays bare the fact that comprehending a spoken sentence, understanding a visual scene, or just thinking about the day's events involves the coalescing of different neuronal activation patterns over time, i.e., a continuous state-space trajectory that flirts with a series of point attractors. As a result, the brain cannot help but spend most of its time instantiating patterns of activity that are in between identifiable mental states rather than in them. When this scenario is combined with the fact that most cognitive processes are richly embedded in their environmental context in real time, the state space (in which brief visitations of attractor basins are your 'thoughts') suddenly encompasses not just neuronal dimensions, but extends to biomechanical and environmental dimensions as well. As a result, your moment-by-moment experience of the world around you, even right now, can be described as a continuous trajectory through a high-dimensional state space that comprises diverse mental states.
Spivey has organized The Continuity of Mind to present a systematic overview of how perception, cognition, and action are partially overlapping segments of one continuous mental flow, rather than three distinct mental systems. As a result, the apparent partitions that were once thought to separate mental constructs inevitably turn out, upon closer inspection, to be fuzzy graded transitions. The initial chapters provide first-hand demonstrations of the 'gray areas' in mental activity that happen in between discretely labeled mental events, as well as geometric visualizations of attractors in state space that make the dynamical-systems framework seem less mathematically abstract. The middle chapters present scores of behavioral and neurophysiological studies that portray the continuous temporal dynamics inherent in categorization, language comprehension, visual perception, as well as attention, action, and reasoning. The final chapters discuss what the mind itself must look like if its activity is continuous in time and its contents are distributed in state space. The Continuity of Mind is essential reading for those in the cognitive and neural sciences who want to see where the Dynamical Cognition movement is taking us.

While Experiential Learning has been one of the most influential methods in the education and development of managers and management students, it has also been one of the most misunderstood. This Handbook offers the reader a comprehensive picture of current thinking on experiential learning; ideas and examples of experiential learning in practice; and it emphasises the importance of experiential learning to the future of management education.
Contributors include:
Chris Argyris, Joseph Champoux, D. Christopher Kayes, Ruth Colquhoun, John Coopey, Nelarine Cornelius, Elizabeth L. Creese,
Gordon Dehler, Andrea Ellinger, Meretta Elliott, Silvia Gherardi, Jeff Gold, Steve G. Green, Kurt Heppard, Anne Herbert, Robin Holt, Martin J. Hornyak, Paula Hyde, Tusse Sidenius Jensen, Sandra Jones, Anna Kayes, Kirsi Korpiaho, Tracy Lamping, Tony Lingham, Enrico Maria Piras, Sallyanne Miller, Amar Mistry, Dale Murray, Jean Neumann, Barbara Poggio, Keijo Rasanen, Peter Reason, Michael Reynolds, Bente Rugaard Thorsen, Burkard Sievers, Stephen Smith, Sari Stenfors, Antonio Strati, Elaine Swan, Jane Thompson, Richard Thorpe, Kiran Trehan, Russ Vince, Jane Rohde Voight, Tony Watson, and Ann Welsh.

For years now, learning has been at the heart of research within cognitive psychology. How do we acquire new knowledge and new skills? Are the principles underlying skill acquisition unique to learning, or similar to those underlying other behaviours? Is the mental system essentially modular, or is the mental system a simple product of experience, a product that, inevitably, reflects the shape of the external world with all of its specialisms and similarities? This new books takes the view that learning is a major influence on the nature of the processes and representations that fill our minds. Throughout, the authors review and consider the psychological research areas of skill acquisition and lexical representation to illustrate the effects that practice can have on cognitive phenomena. They also draw parallels between theories in physical and biological domains to not only propose a new theory of mental function but also demonstrate that the mind is subject to the same natural laws as the physical world. In so doing Speelman and Kirsner present a new perspective on Psychology--one that identifies universal principles underlying all behaviours and one which contrasts markedly from our current focus on highly specific behaviours. Accessibly written, Beyond the Learning Curve is a thought provoking and challenging new text for students and researchers in the cognitive sciences.

Since the turn of the century the phenomenon of learning has received increasingly more attention. Within the theoretical field, a variety of theories of learning have evolved. The field of research on learning has become very complex, with different foci, founders and proponents, schools, and disciplinary approaches. This book is a first publication in the On the definition of learning network. The network arose out of the aspiration to study the phenomenon of learning in depth and to understand its complex relationship to empirical investigation and teaching. Based on the assumption that it is important to be sensitive to the variety of concepts and theories of learning in the field, and to continue to cultivate that variety, the book takes a step towards actively and critically engaging the various approaches in the field of learning theory. At the same time it emphasizes the complex relationships that exist between conceptualizations of learning and the empirical phenomenon of learning and teaching. It discusses how conceptualizations of learning are put to work in educational contexts and how the normative aspects of learning in relation to discussions of what is considered worth learning influence the formative processes of human development.

Advances in human genetics and genomics are beginning to move outside the traditional realm of medicine and into the classroom. How will educational officials react when asked to incorporate personalized genomic information into the educational program? This volume bridges the divide between science, education and ethics around the emergent integration of genomics and education. By pairing comprehensive analysis of the issues with primers on the underlying science, the authors put all relevant parties on a level field to facilitate thorough consideration and educated discussion regarding how to move forward in this new era, as well as how best to support the future of education and the future of all students. The volume is unique in bringing together not only scholarly experts but also parents and laypersons. In doing so, it gives voice and understanding to a broad spectrum of disciplines that have a stake in the future of education.