This is a response to "The Ethical Knower: Rethinking Our Pedagogy in the Age of Trump" by Elana Michelson. We appreciate Michelson's critical evaluation of the appropriateness of transformative learning and the use of personal narrative, as well as the frames and tools she offers to help us deal with current challenges such as…

This commentary extends and amplifies aspects of the Cantor, Osher, Berg, Steyer and Rose (2018) discussion about what we know about the nature of learning and its implications for how we educate students across the span from early childhood through advanced levels of formal education. The paper's overall goal is to offer some guidance and…

Over 34 years since its conception, research in educational settings has found evidence for the effectiveness of the 5E Instructional Model. Indeed, several studies have reported evidence of a better conceptual understanding of scientific ideas and models, positive effects on general achievement in science, and positive attitudes toward science.…

The focal paper by Baird et al. in this special issue argues that there are few issues more important in education than the relationship between assessment and learning. On the one hand, learning is the ultimate goal of all educational interventions; on the other, assessment has become a leviathan that constrains and shapes virtually all of that…

In this commentary, Mary James highlights two problems she deemed critical during her work exploring the relationships between assessment and learning in theory and practice. First, efforts to improve assessment for learning were not always successful either in improving performance or in other ways. Second, and this may be a reason for the first…

An exponential increase in the availability of information over the last two decades has asked for novel theoretical frameworks to examine how students optimally learn under these new learning conditions, given the limitations of human processing ability. In this special issue and in the current editorial introduction, we argue that such a novel…

This is an editorial for a special issue "Innovations in Exploring Sequential Process Data" in the journal Zeitschrift für Psychologie. Process data refer to log files generated by human-computer interactive items. They document the entire process, including keystrokes, mouse clicks as well as the associated time stamps, performed by a…

Purpose: This paper aims to provide an overview of the development of learning organization concepts from the perspective of Dr. Peter Senge and presents an interesting evolution of his systems oriented view of the learning organization field over three decades. Design/methodology/approach: Through a conversation with a thought leading scholar,…

In this article, Dylan William states that the central claim in Baird, et al.'s piece is that if theories of assessment take into account theories of learning, assessments will somehow be more valid, and some of the more egregious effects of assessment on learning will be ameliorated. William responds to this claim by arguing that it seems…

James P. Lantolf is George and Jane Greer Professor Emeritus of Language Acquisition and Applied Linguistics and former director of the Center for Advanced Language Proficiency Education and Research at the Pennsylvania State University, USA. He is currently Adjunct Professor of Applied Linguistics in the same academic unit at Xi'an Jiaotong…

The aim of this paper is to critique the individualistic ontological premises of 'self-directed learning', as it has been developed in humanist education literature in the tradition of Carl Rogers. The authors suggest instead that social-transformative education and its critical social ontology serve the emancipatory promise of education better…

The author's commentary focuses more on the quantitative discussion about educational assessment of the original article than on the idea of the assessment for learning, which did not raise any substantial issues. He starts by offering some general comments on the paper. He feels the authors made a number of assumptions about quantitative…

This issue's featured article, "Assessment and Learning: Fields Apart" (Baird, Andrich, Hopfenbeck, and Stobart 2017) raises issues that are of basic importance for the disciplines of assessment and teaching and learning theory. In this commentary, Alex Scharaschkin restricts his remarks to a few areas. He considers the idea of a…

This paper presents a personal account of developments in research on online learning over the past 30 years. Research on how to design online instruction represents an example of applying the science of learning to education. It contributes to the science of learning (as exemplified by developments in cognitive load theory, the cognitive theory…

There's no doubt that research bearing directly on classroom practice is crucial. In this article Daniel Willingham maintains that it's useful for educators also to know the basic science around children's cognition, emotion, and motivation, because beliefs about what children are like inevitably influence teaching practice. The purpose of…