If all humor does indeed come from pain, then American educational policymaking has been a petri dish brimming with hilarity. Even before Betsy DeVos ascended to her perch atop the U.S. Department of Education, her predecessors had offered up an excruciating decade of fodder for satire. Ably assisted by a bevy of billionaires, foundations, and advocacy think tanks, these policymakers unleashed a torrent of rhetorical gibberish and evidence-free "innovations" on the nation's children and their schools. Potential Grizzlies: Making the Nonsense Bearable is one researcher's attempt to laugh instead of cry. The book will bring back memories of policymakers from more innocent times, from Michelle Rhee to Arne Duncan to Chris Christie. Sit back and relax with fond thoughts of your favorite policies, from testing to school choice to "parent trigger." Or maybe just smile and imagine a day when policymakers turn to research evidence and knowledgeable educators to build a sound future for our children.

As the use of technology spreads throughout communities, it is a natural progression that those resources will be given to classrooms. In order to provide the best education possible, all resources must be used. Learning, however, is not only done within the classroom; community learning (such as Society 4.0 and Society 5.0) involves remote learning and learning in the community. Cases on Technologies in Education From Classroom 2.0 to Society 5.0 presents case studies on the best practices from practitioners using future technologies for education beyond the classroom. The content within the book specifically includes Classroom 2.0 (networking of education institutions and learners), School 3.0 (situated learning in community venues beyond the classroom), Society 4.0 (sharing education practice and delivering learning remotely), and Society 5.0 (ubiquitous education in smart cities, towns, and villages). Covering topics such as cross-community education, ed-tech, and innovation paths, this book is an in-depth reference for administrators, schools, colleges, and universities looking to embed technology into the way they deliver education, as well as educational software developers, IT consultants, researchers, students, academicians, and teachers looking to enhance the way they educate their learners through technology.

Education today has been influenced by several factors that are changing the purpose and goals of understanding and thinking and, consequently, how we assess students' understanding. One of these influences has been the rapid advancement and accessibility of digital technologies. While the use and impact of digital technologies as a valuable tool to improve teaching and learning is well documented, there is little discussion of innovative methods used to assess teaching and learning in digital environments. It is important educators view assessments considering the tools used for learning. Even when digital technologies are ubiquitous in education, assessment methods continue to use traditional assessments, typically multiple-choice or short answer. They are inadequate to provide information about a student's reasoning and conceptual understanding, thus they are limited in measuring the sophisticated knowledge and skills needed for 21-century careers. Digital technologies can support inquiry-based learning that is essential to developing a deep conceptual understanding of the content. Innovative practices that include digital-based assessment models allow students to demonstrate higher-order skills while integrating digital technologies as a powerful teaching tool. The book explores the use of digital-based assessments to measure knowledge, shares research and pedagogies related to digital-based assessments, identifies digital tools and applications for the effective assessment of learning, shares models of digital-based assessment in digital learning environments, and identifies best practices and innovation in digital-based assessment. It is ideal for higher education faculty, classroom teachers, administrators, policymakers, educational technologists, and graduate students.

Despite the efforts of teachers and educators, every year secondary schools across the English-speaking world turn out millions of functionally illiterate leavers. The costs in human misery and in wasted productivity are catastrophic. What can schools do to prevent this situation? In this highly accessible book James and Dianne Murphy combine more than 50 years of experience to provide teachers with a thorough, easy to use introduction to the extensive research on reading and its effects on student achievement. Drawing on the work of experts from around the world, the authors explore how we learn to read, how the many myths and misconceptions around reading developed, and why they continue to persist.Building on these foundations chapters go on to examine how the general secondary school classroom can support all levels of reading more effectively, regardless of subject; how school leaders can ensure that their systems, practices and school culture deliver the very best literacy provision for all students; and what it takes to ensure that a racing intervention aimed at adolescent struggling readers is truly effective. The overall message of this books is one of great optimism: the authors demonstrate that the right of every child to learn to read is entirely achievable if schools employ the best research-driven practice.

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, universities around the globe have taken numerous extraordinary measures and implemented many changes to their strategic, operational, and academic activities. Currently, there is a transformation taking place from the emergency decision-making in the early stages of the pandemic towards reflection and resolution on how the past months can shape governance and strategy. Higher education institutions have been facing challenges with the alignment of their university governance for their strategic and operational plans. Presently, university leaders have prioritized risk management and financial management over all else. Unfortunately, due to these priorities, university responses to the pandemic took the top-down approach of management, rejecting the shared governance structures and collegial practices of the institutions. The pandemic has accelerated the openness to change by creating an emergency or steering response team led by university presidents and provosts, with sub-teams focusing on operations and other academic advisory groups working together to deal with the fast-rising scenarios. The consequence is a clear flow of information and strong communication across the institution, which sequentially builds on mechanisms to respond to the secondary effects of the pandemic. Moreover, higher education institutions are continuously facing challenges with their strategic alignment of business objectives in order to have a diverse educational system in response to the pandemic. Assessing University Governance and Policies in Relation to the COVID-19 Pandemic presents the latest research and studies investigating information on university governance and adapting previous, existing, and proposed models for the current pandemic. This book is comprised of chapters contributed by various leading international authors to discuss and analyze all aspects of university governance in relation to their impact on strategies in finance, sustainability, academic issues, research, faculty and students, leadership, campus, employment and recruitments, and more. This is an essential text for university presidents, strategic planning authorities in universities, college deans and academic department chairpersons, government authorities and policymakers, researchers, students, and academicians.