Brain-based initiatives and school readiness mandates in education have prompted researchers to examine the biological mechanisms associated with learning in the hope that understanding empirical evidence can maximize learning potential. Current research has examined working memory skills in relationship to early learning. The function of working…

Attrition in apprenticeships and traineeships is an ongoing concern for employers and government alike, with completion standing at around 50% on average. One possible explanation for this high attrition rate is that there is a mismatch between the respective expectations of apprentices/trainees and employers. This research uses the concept of the…

This timely book takes up the challenge of maintaining programs in the arts in the face of unrelenting pressure from two directions; the increasing focus on literacy and numeracy in schools, teamed with the cut-backs in public funding that often affect the arts most severely. Drawing on the wealth of evidence already available on the impact of the…

This article addresses the question, How do changes in policy discourses shape public representations of literacy learners and the goals of adult literacy education? It examines specifically how the agency of adult literacy learners is constructed. We carry out a critical discourse analysis of two key adult literacy policy documents from the U.K.:…

With deliberate system-level reform now being acted upon around the world, both successful and unsuccessful cases provide a rich source of knowledge from which we can learn to improve large-scale reform. Research surrounding the effectiveness of a theory-based system-wide numeracy reform operating in primary schools across Australia is examined to…

The purpose of this study was to examine technical and instructional features of a kindergarten curriculum-based measurement (CBM) tool designed to track students' mathematics progress in terms of computational concepts, procedures, and counting strategies. Students in 10 kindergarten classrooms in three elementary schools completed alternate…

This article originates in a networking project that facilitated the coming together of a group of Skills for Life (SfL) teachers from different Further Education (FE) contexts across the West Midlands region of England. The original impetus was to explore and develop a model of Continuing Professional Development (CPD) that was shaped by the…

The residue number system (RNS) has been an important research field in computer arithmetic for many decades, mainly because of its carry-free nature, which can provide high-performance computing architectures with superior delay specifications. Recently, research on RNS has found new directions that have resulted in the introduction of efficient…

Vocational Education and Training (VET) in high schools has had positive effects on the retention of Indigenous students, providing important pathways into further education and the workforce. However, low-level literacy (and numeracy) skills can make successful completion difficult, especially for students who speak Standard Australian English as…

With increased accountability attached to students' results on national testing in Australia, teachers feel under pressure to prepare students for the tests. However, this can lead to shallow teaching of a narrowed curriculum. An alternative approach involves using data to identify common errors and misconceptions, discussing strategies aimed at…

In collaboration with preservice elementary teachers and in-service kindergarten teachers, the authors engaged in small-scale, demand-side production of educational software focused on numeracy skills. That is, the authors built applications designed to address children's specific learning needs as they surfaced in the classroom and were…

The Skills for Life (SfL) initiative followed the Moser Report (1999) and incarnated a Third Way agenda that sought to address England's perceived adult skills deficit. SfL marked a large investment in adult education but also a distinct shift to a more focused, instrumentalist role for Further Education (FE) in England. A new structure of teacher…

As a policy initiative to improve student achievement, a number of jurisdictions have introduced compulsory literacy and numeracy standards for senior secondary students, the meeting of which forms a hurdle requirement for the award of the senior secondary exit certificate. While such a requirement is sometimes justified by policymakers as a…

Numeracy--that is, how facile people are with mathematical concepts and their applications--is gaining importance in medical decision making and risk communication. This article proposes six critical functions of health numeracy. These functions are integrated into a theoretical framework on health numeracy that has implications for risk…

In two different contexts, we examined the hypothesis that individual differences in working memory (WM) capacity are related to the tendency to infer complex, ordinal relationships "between" numerical symbols. In Experiment 1, we assessed whether this tendency arises in a learning context that involves mapping novel symbols to quantities by…