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As ways of making meaning in drama strongly resemble the ways that meanings are made in everyday social life, forms of drama learn from everyday life and, at a societal level, people in everyday life learn from drama. Through history, from the emergence of drama in Western culture, the learning that results at a societal level from the interactions of everyday social life and drama have been noted by scholars. In contemporary culture, electronic and digitized forms of mediation and communication have diversified its content and massively expanded its audiences. Although there are reciprocal relations between everyday life and drama, aspects of everyday life are selected and shaped into the various cultural forms of drama. Processes of selection and shaping crystallize significant aspects of everyday social relations, allowing audiences of and participants in drama to learn and to reflect critically on particular facets of social life. In the 20th century, psychological theories of learning have been developed, taking note of the sociocultural relationships between drama, play, and learning. Learning in and through drama is seen as being socially organized, whole person learning that mobilizes and integrates the bodies and minds of learners. Making signs and meanings through various forms of drama, it is interactive, experiential learning that is semiotically mediated via physical activity. Alongside the various forms of drama that circulate in wider culture, sociocultural theories of learning have also influenced drama pedagogies in schools. In the later part of the 20th century and into the 21st century, drama practices have diversified and been applied as a means of learning in a range of community- and theater-based contexts outside of schooling. Practices in drama education and applied drama and theater, particularly since the late 20th century and into the early 21st century, have been increasingly supported by research employing a range of methods, qualitative, quantitative, and experimental.

Classroom management remains a serious concern for educators in both pre-service and in-service realms. A mostly white teaching force may struggle to teach students who are very different from themselves. These differences can make it difficult for teachers to understanding cultural differences and conflicts as they emerge in the classroom, and students may suffer. Culturally responsive classroom management provides a framework for educators to build knowledge, mindsets, attitudes, dispositions, and practices necessary for academic and social success. Elements of classroom management to advance and support teaching practices that meet the needs of students are worthwhile to explore.

Crucial to understanding the behavior of judges and the outputs of courts is the institutional context in which they operate. One key component of courts’ institutional structure is that the judiciary is organized as a hierarchy, which creates both problems and opportunities for judges. For instance, one problem for judges at the top of a hierarchy is how to best exercise oversight of lower court judges, whose decisions are often not reviewed by higher courts. One opportunity is that higher courts can reverse errors by lower courts; another is that, as new legal issues emerge, hierarchy provides opportunities for judges to learn from one another. Scholars of the judicial hierarchy have pursued two broad approaches. The “team perspective” begins by assuming that all judges in a hierarchy have the same values or principles, and thus care only about achieving the correct outcome in a given case. In the team approach, the key problem in adjudication is informational. All judges agree on the correct outcome of a case, conditional on understanding the relevant facts, but may lack this understanding due to resource constraints or informational advantages enjoyed by litigants. The agency approach, by contrast assumes that judges in the hierarchy have differing preferences, and the key problem is how higher courts can ensure compliance by lower courts. Despite these different foundational assumptions, the team and agency approaches have both been employed successfully to study core questions regarding the judicial hierarchy, including: why hierarchy exists; how higher courts can best oversee lower courts; how learning takes place both within and across the levels of the judiciary; and how collegiality influences judicial decision-making. Yet, while our understanding of the judicial hierarchy has greatly increased in recent years, many questions remain, such as how judges learn and how to measure legal doctrine.

Training is the systematic processes initiated by the organization that facilitate relatively permanent changes in the knowledge, skills, or affect/attitudes of organizational members. Cumulative meta-analytic evidence indicates that training is effective, producing, on average, moderate effect sizes. Training is most effective when designed so that trainees are active and encouraged to self-regulate during training, and when it is well-structured and requires effort on the part of trainees. Additional characteristics of effective training are: The purpose, objectives, and intended outcomes of training are clearly communicated to trainees; the training content is meaningful, and training assignments, examples, and exercises are relevant to the job; trainees are provided with instructional aids that can help them organize, learn, and recall training content; opportunities for practice in a safe environment are provided; feedback is provided by trainers, observers, peers, or the task itself; and training enables learners to observe and interact with others. In addition, effective training requires a prior needs assessment to ensure the relevance of training content and provides conditions to optimize trainees’ motivation to learn. After training, care should be taken to provide opportunities for trainees to implement trained skills, and organizational and social support should be in place to optimize transfer. Finally, it is important that all training be evaluated to ensure learning outcomes are met and that training results in increased job performance and/or organizational effectiveness.

The study of aging and cognitive skill learning is concerned with age-related changes and differences in how we gather, store, and use information and abilities. As life expectancy continues to rise, resulting in greater numbers and proportions of older individuals in the population, understanding the development and retention of skills across the lifespan is increasingly important. Older adults’ task performance in cognitive skill learning is often equal to that of young adults, albeit not as efficient, where older adults often require more time to complete training. Investigations of age differences in fundamental cognitive processes of attention, memory, or executive functioning generally reveal declines in older adults. These are related to a slowing of cognitive processing. Slowing in cognitive processing results in longer time necessary to complete tasks which can interfere with the fidelity of older adults’ cognitive processes in time-limited scenarios. Despite this, older adults maintain comparable rates of learning with young adults, albeit with some reduced efficiency in more complex tasks. The effectiveness of older adults’ learning is also impacted by a lesser tendency to recognize and adopt efficient learning strategies, as well as less flexibility in strategy use relative to younger adults. In learning tasks that involve a transition from using a complex initial strategy to relying on memory retrieval, older adults show a volitional avoidance of memory that is related to lower memory confidence and an impoverished mental model of the task. Declines in learning are not entirely problematic from a functional perspective, however, as older adults can often rely upon their extensive knowledge to compensate for certain deficiencies, particularly in everyday tasks. Indeed, domains where older adults have maintained expertise are somewhat insulated from other age-related declines.

Play as an academic field comprises multiple disciplines, definitions, and objectives and acknowledges a link between play and learning. Historically and in contemporary societies, play has been used as a teaching methodology; this occurs in formal classroom pedagogy as well as outside the classroom as part of informal and improvisational curriculum. Because play generally includes a component of pleasure, as a methodology it compels entry into learning in a way other practices do not. Yet this playful learning can be problematic, depending on outcomes and structures that define the play/learning experience through narrative and power dynamics. Scholars may analyze various aspects of curricular play, including but not limited to narratives provided, students’ lived experiences within those narratives, actions allowable, objectives and advancement, and sources developing the narratives.

Statistical learning refers to the ability to pick up on the statistical regularities in our sensory environment, typically without intention or conscious awareness. Since the seminal publication on statistical learning in 1996, sensitivity to regularities has become a key concept in our understanding of language acquisition as well as other cognitive functions such as perception and attention. Neuroimaging studies investigating which brain areas underpin statistical learning have mapped a network of domain-general regions in the medial temporal lobe as well as modality-specific regions in early sensory cortices. Research using electroencephalography has further demonstrated how sensitivity to structure impacts the brain’s processing of sensory input. In response to concerns about the large discrepancy between the very simplistic artificial regularities employed in laboratory experiments on statistical learning and the much noisier and more complex regularities humans face in the real world, recent studies have taken more ecological approaches.

African philosophies of education are multifold, depending on the specific geographic location in which a particular African philosophy of education is advanced. In northern Africa, African philosophy of education is biased towards Muslim understandings of education, whereas in western Africa, African philosophy of education is mostly attuned to Francophone thinking. In eastern Africa, Anglophone thinking seems to dominate an African philosophy of education. The focus on African philosophy of education is guided by thinking in the southern African region. In the main, African philosophy of education in the southern African region of the continent is considered as a philosophical activity that aims to identify major socio-economic, environmental, and politico-cultural problems on the African continent, and simultaneously to examine the educational implications of such problems for teaching and learning in higher education. It can be construed, for instance, that a military dictatorship is a major political and social problem on the continent, which implies that any form of democratic governance would be undermined. An educational implication of such a problem is that deliberative engagement among university teachers and students would not be regarded as appealing for higher education, as such a practice would be considered incommensurable with dictatorial rule. Identifying any other major problems or dystopias—such as terrorism committed by Boko Haram in western Africa (a violent movement undermining any form of Western education); children being used as soldiers in central Africa; and drug trafficking in sub-Saharan Africa—by proffering reasons why the latter instances are problems, and then examining how educational practices will manifest, are tantamount to enacting an African philosophy of education.

Parental engagement in children and young people’s learning has been shown to be an important lever for school improvement and young people’s outcomes. However, parents are rarely involved in school reform movements. These reform movements are generally centered on the school rather than on improvement of learning per se. Shifting the focus away from the school and to learning as an overarching aim requires the inclusion of and partnership with parents. This is a new way of understanding school reform but has the best chance of supporting all students, including those not best served by the schooling systems in the early 21st century. The reforms here are chiefly concerned with U.K. schooling systems, but could be more widely applicable, and call on a wide range of evidence, from the United Kingdom and beyond.

Compared to other animals or to artificial agents, humans are unique in the extent of their abilities to learn and adapt to changing environments. When focusing on skill learning and model-based approaches, learning can be conceived as a progression of increasing, then decreasing, dimensions of representing knowledge. First, initial learning demands exploration of the learning space and the identification of the relevant dimensions for the novel task at hand. Second, intermediate learning requires a refinement of these relevant dimensions of knowledge and behavior to continue improving performance while increasing efficiency. Such improvements utilize chunking or other forms of dimensionality reduction to diminish task complexity. Finally, late learning ensures automatization of behavior through habit formation and expertise development, thereby reducing the need to effortfully control behavior. While automatization greatly increases efficiency, there is also a trade-off with the ability to generalize, with late learning tending to be highly specific to the learned features and contexts. In each of these phases a variety of interacting factors are relevant: Declarative instructions, prior knowledge, attentional deployment, and cognitive fitness have unique roles to play. Neural contributions to processes involved also shift from earlier to later points in learning as effortfulness initially increases and then gives way to automaticity. Interestingly, video games excel at providing uniquely supportive environments to guide the learner through each of these learning stages. This fact makes video games a useful tool for both studying learning, due to their engaging nature and dynamic range of complexity, as well as engendering learning in domains such as education or cognitive training.

Assessment needs to be a positive experience that can incite learners to progress their learning, understand themselves as learners, become excited about what they learn, and acknowledge that learning is more than the specified and often prescribed curriculum. Educational assessment typically requires students to demonstrate their knowledge, understanding, or application of their skills as a way to demonstrate their learning or, more specifically, their learning outcomes. Often this is to attract an external grade or mark related to an externally identified “standard,” or to show their level of “need” and thereby access additional resources. Students generally have little say in when or what is assessed, and their experiences have largely not been taken into account. There is a distinct difference between what a student learns and how the assessment results reflect their learning. To incite learning, assessment practices and processes need to celebrate learning and provide learners with positive, encouraging messages that their efforts contribute to their own growth. When the assessment process enables learners to see their own culture and identity valued, and allows opportunities to showcase diversity of learning, it becomes a meaningful and authentic process. In educational contexts, the process of assessment is typically an approach to support, measure, initiate, monitor, and explain the learning of self or others. Assessment of student learning has complex social, emotional, and academic influences on learners and on their lives more generally. A key unintended consequence of these practices has been well documented with regards to negative social and emotional consequences for the student, and these must be weighed against the “good” any assessment will do in terms of knowing the student and their learning aspirations. However, while there are distracting elements associated with the assessment of students, there is also value in using appropriate methods and processes to enhance and incite learning. Ultimately the rights of the learner to be included in their own assessment practices is key, and therefore it is argued the young person must be an agentic and capable assessor of their own learning for any assessment to be educational, culturally relevant, and authentic.

Technology proficiency is the ability to use technology to communicate effectively and professionally, organize information, produce high-quality products, and enhance thinking skills. In classroom settings, technology proficiency refers to the ability of teachers to integrate technology to teach and facilitate, as well as to improve learning, productivity, and performance. These abilities are needed to participate in a technological world. Technology proficiency enables teachers to identify and explore a wide variety of technological tools and devices in order to determine and select those that best respond to teaching and learning contents. Among teachers, basic proficiency in information technologies is typically used to communicate electronically, organize activities and information, and create documents in schools or higher-education institutions. Proficiency in using technological tools and devices can be achieved through experience and instruction. It is necessary to introduce experimentation into teaching practices and maintain accessible technological tools and devices. Technology proficiency seems relevant to many aspects of the teaching profession, such as lesson preparation and development of teaching kids. Other aspects that impact teacher decisions to introduce technology into teaching and learning activities are teachers’ beliefs about the way the subject should be taught and the skills associated with teacher competence in managing classroom activities using technology tools and devices. Therefore, teachers must be able to apply the technological knowledge and skills required in professional job roles and responsibilities in order to achieve the expected outputs. As an educator in the 21st century, it is imperative to integrate technology into the curriculum for a variety of reasons. Students need to be exposed to and be familiar with technologies in order to compete in the world marketplace, and they need to be able to integrate them in dynamic social environments. The world is dominated by technology in all forms, and to be successful, students must possess 21st-century skills. In addition, technology proficiency improves efficiency in teaching and facilitating. Being more efficient usually means that teachers have more time, and it allows additional space for innovation, planning, conversing, thinking, and creativity. Technology can be instrumental in making teachers more efficient.

Language is a structured form of communication that is unique to humans. Within the first few years of life, typically developing children can understand and produce full sentences in their native language or languages. For centuries, philosophers, psychologists, and linguists have debated how we acquire language with such ease and speed. Central to this debate has been whether the learning process is driven by innate capacities or information in the environment. In the field of psychology, researchers have moved beyond this dichotomy to examine how perceptual and cognitive biases may guide input-driven learning and how these biases may change with experience. There is evidence that this integration permeates the learning and development of all aspects of language—from sounds (phonology), to the meanings of words (lexical-semantics), to the forms of words and the structure of sentences (morphosyntax). For example, in the area of phonology, newborns’ bias to attend to speech over other signals facilitates early learning of the prosodic and phonemic properties of their native language(s). In the area of lexical-semantics, infants’ bias to attend to novelty aids in mapping new words to their referents. In morphosyntax, infants’ sensitivity to vowels, repetition, and phrase edges guides statistical learning. In each of these areas, too, new biases come into play throughout development, as infants gain more knowledge about their native language(s).

As contemporary societies continue to integrate digital technologies into varying aspects of everyday life—including work, schooling, and play—the concept of digital game-based learning (DGBL) has become increasingly influential. The term DGBL is often used to characterize the relationship of computer-based games (including games played on dedicated gaming consoles and mobile devices) to various learning processes or outcomes. The concept of DGBL has its origins in interdisciplinary research across the computational and social sciences, as well as the humanities. As interest in computer games and learning within the field of education began to expand in the late 20th century, DGBL became somewhat of a contested term. Even foundational concepts such as the definition of games (as well as their relationship to simulations and similar artifacts), the affordances of digital modalities, and the question of what “counts” as learning continue to spark debate among positivist, interpretivist, and critical framings of DGBL. Other contested areas include the ways that DGBL should be assessed, the role of motivation in DGBL, and the specific frameworks that should inform the design of games for learning. Scholarship representing a more positivist view of DGBL typically explores the potential of digital games as motivators and influencers of human behavior, leading to the development of concepts such as gamification and other uses of games for achieving specified outcomes, such as increasing academic measures of performance, or as a form of behavioral modification. Other researchers have taken a more interpretive view of DGBL, framing it as a way to understand learning, meaning-making, and play as social practices embedded within broader contexts, both local and historical. Still others approach DGBL through a more critical paradigm, interrogating issues of power, agency, and ideology within and across applications of DGBL. Within classrooms and formal settings, educators have adopted four broad approaches to applying DGBL: (a) integrating commercial games into classroom learning; (b) developing games expressly for the purpose of teaching educational content; (c) involving students in the creation of digital games as a vehicle for learning; and (d) integrating elements such as scoreboards, feedback loops, and reward systems derived from digital games into non-game contexts—also referred to as gamification. Scholarship on DGBL focusing on informal settings has alternatively highlighted the socially situated, interpretive practices of gamers; the role of affinity spaces and participatory cultures; and the intersection of gaming practices with the lifeworlds of game players. As DGBL has continued to demonstrate influence on a variety of fields, it has also attracted criticism. Among these critiques are the question of the relative effectiveness of DGBL for achieving educational outcomes. Critiques of the quality and design of educational games have also been raised by educators, designers, and gamers alike. Interpretive scholars have tended to question the primacy of institutionally defined approaches to DGBL, highlighting instead the importance of understanding how people make meaning through and with games beyond formal schooling. Critical scholars have also identified issues in the ethics of DGBL in general and gamification in particular as a form of behavior modification and social control. These critiques often intersect and overlap with criticism of video games in general, including issues of commercialism, antisocial behaviors, misogyny, addiction, and the promotion of violence. Despite these criticisms, research and applications of DGBL continue to expand within and beyond the field of education, and evolving technologies, social practices, and cultural developments continue to open new avenues of exploration in the area.

The strategic management of technology and innovation is an important contributor to organizational performance and competitiveness. It creates value, assists differentiation, enhances productivity, and guides creativity and initiative. In the face of uncertainty in operating environments, caused especially by rapid technological change, the strategic management of innovation configures capabilities and resources within organizations. These include the capability to search for innovations, select the most advantageous, and appropriate or capture their returns. It involves investing in sources of innovation, such as research and development (R&D) and collaboration with external partners, and using methods for effectively assessing their contributions. Unstable and turbulent operating conditions can disrupt established organizational policies and practices and make planning difficult. As a result, strategies for technology and innovation are necessarily emergent rather than prescriptive, exploratory rather than determinable. Any advantages technology and innovation create are likely to be transitory. The pressing need for greater environmental sustainability, increased focus on the social consequences of innovation, and the impact of new digital and data-rich technologies, add to the challenges of the strategic management of technology and innovation. To address these challenges, attention to physical and intellectual capital needs to be supplemented by greater concern for human, social, and natural capital, and to organizational culture and behavior. This requires the foundation of the strategic management of technology and innovation in the discipline of economics to be complemented by others, such as psychology, organizational behavior, and ethics.

The advocacy coalition framework (ACF) was developed to explain policy processes where contentious coalitions of actors seek to translate competing belief systems into public policy. Advocacy coalitions may include interest groups, members of the media, scientists and academics, and government officials that share beliefs about a public issue and coordinate their behavior. These advocacy coalitions engage in various strategies using resources to influence policy change or stasis. As part of this process, advocacy coalition members may learn within and/or across coalitions. This framework is one of the most prominent and widely applied approaches to explain public policy. While it has been applied hundreds of times, in over 50 different countries, the vast majority of ACF applications have sought to explain domestic policy processes. A reason for the paucity of applications to foreign policy is that some ACF assumptions may not seem congruent to foreign policy issues. For example, the ACF uses a policy subsystem as the unit of analysis that may include a territorial dimension. Yet, the purpose of the territorial dimension is to limit the scope of the study. Therefore, this dimension can be substituted for a government body that has the authority or potential authority to make and implement foreign policy. In addition, the ACF assumes a central role for technical and scientific information in the policy process. Such information makes learning across coalitions more conducive, but the ACF can and should also be applied to normative issues, such as those more common among foreign policy research. This article introduces the ACF; provides an overview of the framework, including assumptions, key concepts and theories, and transferability of the ACF to foreign policy analysis; and discusses four exemplary applications. In addition, it proposes future research that scholars should explore as part of the nexus of the ACF and foreign policy analysis. In the final analysis, the authors suggest the ACF can and should be applied to foreign policy analysis to better understand the development of advocacy coalitions and how they influence changes and stasis in foreign policy.

Motivation and engagement are firmly implicated in students’ participation in class, educational aspirations, enjoyment of school, academic learning, and academic achievement. Motivation refers to an individual’s inclination, energy, direction, and drive with respect to learning and achievement. Engagement involves the thoughts, actions, and emotions that reflect this inclination, energy, and drive. There are numerous theories articulating the key elements of students’ motivation and engagement. These theories describe how and why motivation and engagement are important for educational outcomes in their own right, as well as how and why motivation and engagement are important means to other desirable educational outcomes. Given the vast array of different theories in the areas of motivation and engagement, researchers have made calls to integrate the body of knowledge that has amassed. The Motivation and Engagement Wheel is an example of a multidimensional framework that traverses salient motivation and engagement factors from major theory and research. These factors encompass positive motivation constructs (self-efficacy, valuing, and mastery orientation), positive engagement constructs (planning, task management, and persistence), negative motivation constructs (anxiety, uncertain control, and failure avoidance), and negative engagement constructs (self-handicapping and disengagement). A broad body of research provides support for the salience of the factors in the Wheel in relation to a range of other variables (e.g., background characteristics, cultural factors) and through a variety of research designs and approaches. Importantly, there are additional exciting directions in motivation and engagement research, such as real-time investigations, the use of biomarkers, the interface with teachers, and intervention research, that are relevant to optimizing students’ academic development through school—and beyond.

In light of the broad, multidimensional, and contestable nature of constructivism, a central debate concerns the object of construction. What do we mean when we say that a learner is constructing something? Three general categories, with overlaps in between, are: the construction of meaning, the construction of knowledge, and the construction of knowledge claims. To construct meaning is to make sense of something by understanding both its parts and overall message. To construct knowledge is to obtain what philosophers traditionally call “justified true belief.” There are three conditions in this formulation of knowledge: belief, truth, and justification. Beliefs are intentional, meaningful, and representational, directing a person to attain truth and avoid error with respect to the very thing that person accepts. As for the notions of truth and justification, there are three major theories of truth, namely the correspondence theory, coherence theory, and pragmatic theory; and seven main types of justification, namely perception, reason, memory, testimony, faith, introspection, and intuition. Finally, to construct a knowledge claim is to indicate that one thinks that one knows something. The crucial difference between knowledge and a knowledge claim is that the latter has not acquired the status of knowledge. There are two main implications for teaching and learning that arise from an epistemological exploration of the concept of constructivism: First, educators need to be clear about what they want their students to construct, and how the latter should go about doing it. Informed by learner profiles and other contingent factors, educators should encourage their students to construct meanings, knowledge, and knowledge claims, individually and collaboratively, throughout their schooling years. Second, educators need to guard against some common misconceptions on constructivism in the schooling context. Constructivism, contrary to popular belief, is compatible with direct instruction, teacher guidance, structured learning, content learning, traditional assessment, and standardized testing. In sum, there are no pedagogical approaches and assessment modes that are necessarily constructivist or anticonstructivist. A variety of teaching methods, resources, and learning environments should therefore be employed to support students in their constructing process.

Approaches to education for sustainability, or education for sustainable development, have diversified since the normative concepts of sustainability and sustainable development came into common international policy discourse in the late 1980s. These terms and their conceptualization, somewhat controversially, largely replaced environmental education in international rhetoric and policies. The dominant goal of approaches to environmental education to this point had been promoting environmentally responsible individual behavior through increasing awareness and knowledge of the natural environment and issues related to its protection. This approach began to be critiqued as inadequate for understanding, accounting for, or responding to the complexity, unpredictability, and contestation of sustainability issues, as well as the sociocultural, economic, and political influences shaping such issues as climate change and loss of biodiversity. More discursive and collaborative approaches were conceptualized, such as engaging students in critical issue- or problem-based inquiries, including into the influence of institutional arrangements, social structures, and cultural features on unsustainable practices that characterize socially critical approaches. Action competence approaches provide a conceptual and pedagogical model for developing student capacities to engage in individual and collective local issue-based inquiries and civic actions on urgent socioecological issues to contribute to a more sustainable community. Social and sociocultural learning approaches offer a framework for and emphasize the potential meaningful learning that occurs from bringing individuals or communities together to share, discuss, and reflect on cognitive and normative understandings of local and global socioecological issues. Expanding on the identified positive elements of the previously mentioned approaches, an extension of a socioecological approach in the form of a critical socioecological justice approach embraces the development of a critical and transformative responsiveness to issues of people and place. In such an approach, sociocultural, ecological, and economic sustainability, as well as socioeconomic and environmental justice, could be addressed in grappling with the challenge of rebalancing human–environment and human–human relations. This perspective acknowledges that beyond the ecological imperative, there is a moral imperative to alleviate human suffering and provide basic material well-being for all humankind, such that sustainability has a concern for the human condition as well as the environmental condition.

Teachers matter for many reasons, particularly because they can make a difference in student achievement. Student achievement can help improve school and education quality. Teacher commitment to teaching and its associated aspects are explored, including the characteristics of committed teachers. Committed teachers are characterized by four qualities: having a desire to be good teachers, being more fact purveyors and sources, recognizing and accepting individual worth, and meeting professional responsibilities. Thus, committed teachers need to be prepared, to maintain their commitment, and to improve their performance. Principals can help teachers be committed to teaching, for example, by implementing leadership styles that contribute to their commitment. Education policymakers can make the teaching profession be more appealing by elevating its status, similar to that of doctors, to attract the best candidates.