This book stems from more than 25 years of systematic research into the experience of learning undertaken by a research team trying to account for the obvious differences between more or less successful instances of learning in educational institutions. The book offers an answer in terms of the discovery of critical differences in the structure of the learner's awareness and critical differences in the meaning of the learner's world. The authors offer a detailed account of the empirical fi...

Classroom Discourse and the Space of Learning is about learning in schools and the central role of language in learning. The investigations of learning it reports are based on two premises: First, whatever you are trying to learn, there are certain necessary conditions for succeeding--although you cannot be sure that learning will take place when those conditions are met, you can be sure that no learning will occur if they are not. The limits of what is possible to learn is what t...

Necessary Conditions of Learning presents a research approach (phenomenography) and a theory (the variation theory of learning) introduced and developed by Ference Marton and taken up by his wide and varied following around the world—together with their practical applications in educational contexts. Reflecting Marton’s whole lifetime's work, the unique and significant contribution of this book is to offer an evidence-based answer to the questions "How do we make novel meanings our own?" a...

Universities are rarely structured to facilitate learning and when they are, it is often done so in a limited way. This book looks at the theory and practice of learning and how universities can improve their quality and competence. It tackles the past failure of the quality and competence movements and advocates a move towards 'Universities of Learning'. The authors advocate an integration of elements that are often dealt with separately - theory and practice, teaching and research, and t...

Using illustrative teaching case studies, this book demonstrates how teaching informed by a learning theory, specifically Variation theory, can equip teachers to facilitate possibilities for students’ learning in effective and powerful ways.For a long period of time teaching has been “black-boxed”, in favour of other explanations of why students learn or not, such as motivation and social interaction. A large amount of research on teaching and learning, not the least made using Var...

Why do some children seem to learn mathematics easily and others slave away at it, learning it only with great effort and apparent pain? Why are some people good at algebra but terrible at geometry? How can people who successfully run a business as adults have been failures at math in school? How come some professional mathematicians suffer terribly when trying to balance a checkbook? And why do school children in the United States perform so dismally in international comparisons? These ar...

This volume constitutes the first anthology of texts in cognitive semiotics – the new transdisciplinary study of meaning, mind and communication that combines concepts and methods from semiotics, cognitive science and linguistics – from a multitude of established and younger scholars. The chapters deal with the interaction between language and other semiotic resources, the role of consciousness and concepts, the nature of metaphor, the specificity of human evolution and development, the re...

IMPACT (Interweaving Mathematics Pedagogy and Content for Teaching) is an exciting new series of texts for teacher education which aims to advance the learning and teaching of mathematics by integrating mathematics content with the broader research and theoretical base of mathematics education.The Learning and Teaching of Geometry in Secondary Schools reviews past and present research on the teaching and learning of geometry in secondary schools and proposes an approach fo...

Language, Cognition, and Human Nature collects together for the first time much of Steven Pinker's most influential scholarly work on language and cognition. Pinker's seminal research explores the workings of language and its connections to cognition, perception, social relationships, child development, human evolution, and theories of human nature. This eclectic collection spans Pinker's thirty-year career, exploring his favorite themes in greater depth and scientific detail. It ...

Continuing his exploration of the organization of complexity and the science of design, this new edition of Herbert Simon's classic work on artificial intelligence adds a chapter that sorts out the current themes and tools—chaos, adaptive systems, genetic algorithms—for analyzing complexity and complex systems. There are updates throughout the book as well. These take into account important advances in cognitive psychology and the science of design while confirming and extending the book's...

Big ideas in the mathematics curriculum for older school students, especially those that are hard to learn and hard to teach, are covered in this book. It will be a first port of call for research about teaching big ideas for students from 9-19 and also has implications for a wider range of students. These are the ideas that really matter, that students get stuck on, and that can be obstacles to future learning. It shows how students learn, why they sometimes get things wrong, and the stre...

A proposal for a new way to do cognitive science argues that cognition should be described in terms of agent-environment dynamics rather than computation and representation.While philosophers of mind have been arguing over the status of mental representations in cognitive science, cognitive scientists have been quietly engaged in studying perception, action, and cognition without explaining them in terms of mental representation. In this book, Anthony Chemero descr...