During the last decade there has been increased awareness of the limitations of standard approaches to the study of development. When the focus is on variables and relationships, the individual is easily lost. This book describes an alternative, person-oriented approach in which the focus is on the individual as a functioning whole. The authors take as their theoretical starting points the holistic-interactionistic research paradigm expounded by David Magnusson and others, and the new developmental science in which connections and interactions between different systems (biological, psychological, social, etc.) are stressed. They present a quantitative methodology for preserving--to the maximum extent possible--the individual as a functioning whole that is largely based on work carried out in the Stockholm Laboratory for Developmental Science over the past 20 years. The book constitutes a complete introductory guide to the person-oriented approach. The authors lay out the underlying theory, a number of basic methods, the necessary computer programs, and an extensive empirical example. (The computer programs have been collected into a statistical package, SLEIPNER, that is freely accessible on the Internet. The empirical example deals with boys' school adjustment from a pattern perspective and covers both positive and negative adaptation.) Studying Individual Development in an Interindividual Context: A Person-Oriented Approach will be crucial reading for all researchers who seek to understand the complexities of human development and for their advanced students.

Motivation and Emotion in Learning and Teaching across Educational Contexts brings together current theoretical and methodological perspectives as well as examples of empirical implementations from leading international researchers focusing on the context specificity and situatedness of their core theories in motivation and emotion. The book is compiled of two main sections. Section I covers theoretical reflections and perspectives on the main theories on emotion and motivation in learning and teaching and their transferability across different educational contexts illustrated with empirical examples. Section II addresses the methodological reflections and perspectives on the methodology that is needed to address the complexity and context specificity of motivation and emotion. In addition to general reflections and perspectives regarding methodology, concrete empirical examples are provided. All cutting-edge chapters include current empirical studies on emotions and motivation in learning and teaching across different contexts (age groups, domains, countries, etc.) making them applicable and relevant to a wide range of contexts and settings. This high-quality volume with contributions from leading international experts will be an essential resource for researchers, students and teacher trainers interested in the vital role that motivation and emotions can play in education.

This volume reviews the challenges and alternative approaches to modeling how individuals change across time and provides methodologies and data analytic strategies for behavioral and social science researchers. This accessible guide provides concrete, clear examples of how contextual factors can be included in most research studies. Each chapter can be understood independently, allowing readers to first focus on areas most relevant to their work. The opening chapter demonstrates the various ways contextual factors are represented—as covariates, predictors, outcomes, moderators, mediators, or mediated effects. Succeeding chapters review "best practice" techniques for treating missing data, making model comparisons, and scaling across developmental age ranges. Other chapters focus on specific statistical techniques such as multilevel modeling and multiple-group and multilevel SEM, and how to incorporate tests of mediation, moderation, and moderated mediation. Critical measurement and theoretical issues are discussed, particularly how age can be represented and the ways in which context can be conceptualized. The final chapter provides a compelling call to include contextual factors in theorizing and research. This book will appeal to researchers and advanced students conducting developmental, social, clinical, or educational research, as well as those in related areas such as psychology and linguistics.

The after-school activity context has grown in importance over the past 30yrs as major demographic change (i.e.dual-career families & latchkey children) has swept the country. This bk looks at the influences of after-school activities on child & adol.dev

The second edition of the International Handbook of Lifelong Learning is extensive, innovative, and international in scope, remit and vision, inviting its readers to engage in a critical re-appraisal of the theme of “lifelong learning”. It is a thorough-going, rigorous and scholarly work, with profound and wide-ranging implications for the future of educating institutions and agencies of all kinds in the conception, planning and delivery of lifelong learning initiatives. Lifelong learning requires a wholly new philosophy of learning, education and training, one that aims to facilitate a coherent set of links and pathways between work, school and education, and recognises the necessity for government to give incentives to industry and their employees so they can truly “invest” in lifelong learning. It is also a concept that is premised on the understanding of a learning society in which everyone, independent of race, creed or gender, is entitled to quality learning that is truly excellent. This book recognises the need for profound changes in education and for goals that are critically important to education, economic advancement, and social involvement. To those concerned about the future of our society, our economy and educational provision, this book provides a richly illuminating basis for powerful debate. Drawing extensively on policy analyses, conceptual thinking and examples of informed and world-standard practice in lifelong learning endeavours in the field, both editors and authors seek to focus readers' attention on the many issues and decisions that must be addressed if lifelong learning is to become a reality for us all.

This book honours the contribution of Marjolijn Verspoor to the development and implementation of dynamic usage-based (DUB) approaches in second language (L2) research and pedagogy. With chapters written by renowned experts in the field, the book addresses the dynamics of language, language learning and language teaching from a usage-based perspective. The book contains both theory and empirical work: the initial theoretical chapters present cutting-edge thinking in relation to both the scope of DUB theory and its applications, providing conceptual perspectives from cognitive grammar and linguistics, thinking-for-speaking (TFS), and Complex Dynamic Systems Theory (CDST) approaches, united by their shared underpinnings of language as a dynamic system of conventionalized routines. The second half of the volume showcases state-of-the-art methodologies to study dynamic trajectories of language learning, empirical investigations into the above-mentioned theoretical concepts, and innovative classroom implementations of DUB language pedagogy.

Everything you always wanted to know about theories, meta-theories, methods, and interventions but didn’t realize you needed to ask. This innovative textbook takes advanced undergraduate and graduate students "behind the curtain" of standard developmental science, so they can begin to appreciate the generative value and methodological challenges of a lifespan developmental systems perspective. It envisions applied developmental science as focused on ways to use knowledge about human development to help solve societal problems in real-life contexts, and considers applied developmental research to be purpose driven, field based, community engaged, and oriented toward efforts to optimize development. Based on the authors’ more than 25 years of teaching, this text is designed to help researchers and their students intentionally create a cooperative learning community, full of arguments, doubts, and insights, that can facilitate their own internal paradigm shifts, one student at a time. With the aid of extensive online supplementary materials, students of developmental psychology as well as students in other psychological subdisciplines (such as industrial-organizational, social, and community psychology) and applied professions that rely on developmental training (such as education, social work, counseling, nursing, health care, and business) will find this to be an invaluable guidebook and toolbox for conceptualizing and studying applied problems from a lifespan developmental systems perspective.