A general theme emerges from the chapters herein, as most of the topics coalesce around the dynamic play of the young human and how that relates to children’s learning and early educational practices, theories, and models. Most chapters reflect and respond to the growing and important international interest in early childhood education, with special attention to discussion and critique of the developmental and educational theories of Lev Semenovich Vygotsky.
Educational assessment seeks to determine how well students are learning and is an integral part of the quest for improved education. It provides feedback to students, educators, parents, policy makers, and the public about the effectiveness of educational services. With the movement over the past two decades toward setting challenging academic standards and measuring students’ progress in meeting those standards, educational assessment is playing a greater role in decision making than ever before. In turn, education stakeholders are questioning whether current large-scale assessment practices are yielding the most useful kinds of information for informing and improving education. Meanwhile, classroom assessments, which have the potential to enhance instruction and learning, are not being used to their fullest potential.
The aim of developing CALL is not to provide language learners with novelty, (a novelty which in many cases has already disappeared), but is to improve the quality of language teaching. The aim is not to show how ingenious we are in creating software but to use the computer to help us implement educational aims. More use needs to be made by programmers of educational psychology, methodology and linguistic science.
This book has been designed to provide professional educators, parents, and college students with educational terms, concepts, issues, strategies, and information critical to understanding today's classroom. Containing over 10,000 definitions, acronyms, and abbreviations provides valuable information in areas such as the World Wide Web and computers, legal issues and responsibilities, literacy development, developmental and educational psychology terminology, key mathematical concepts and tables and key bilingual terms in the field.
Part of the authoritative four-volume reference that spans the entire field of child development and has set the standard against which all other scholarly references are compared. Updated and revised to reflect the new developments in the field, the Handbook of Child Psychology, Sixth Edition contains new chapters on such topics as spirituality, social understanding, and non-verbal communication.
Volume 4: Child Psychology in Practice, edited by K. Ann Renninger, Swarthmore College, and Irving E. Sigel, Educational Testing Service, covers child psychology in clinical and educational practice. New topics addressed include educational assessment and evaluation, character education, learning disabilities, mental retardation, media and popular culture, children's health and parenting.
