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What makes a school practice effective and equitable for all students? The answer to this question is the Holy Grail of educational research. Researchers seek to find out how different aspects of school systems—including teacher competence, school characteristics, and educational policies—can be optimized to provide excellent learning opportunities across different groups of students. New knowledge about effective and equitable school practices is essential for evidence-based policymaking that focuses on improving student outcomes and closing the gap in educational inequality. The implementation of national and international large-scale assessments has opened manifold unique research opportunities that contribute to answering this question. Many of these research endeavors require large datasets that encompass numerous schools and allow comparisons across countries or developments over time. Large-scale assessments collect valuable repeated-measurement data using representative samples, which offers the potential to inform educational policy and practice based on generalizable findings. This special issue aims at utilizing both national and international large-scale assessments to gain a better understanding of what makes school practices effective and equitable. The use of Nordic countries as a showcase is crucial, since these countries have very similar historical, cultural, and economic characteristics, which implies that schools and teachers work under somewhat comparable conditions. Nevertheless, the Nordic countries show very different results in the large-scale assessments across subject areas and trends over time. These results indicate that the Nordic education systems are not as similar as one might expect. The special issue will therefore offer valuable knowledge about effective and equitable school practices from this showcase of the Nordic countries. The knowledge drawn from the Nordic showcase will also be relevant for international education systems. Given the recent sharp increase in educational inequalities due to the pandemic, such knowledge takes an even greater urgency than ever before.
The purposeful combination of the skills and computational capabilities of robotics platforms with human expertise and know-how is crucial to realize effective robotic services in real-world ecological environments. In these scenarios, it emerges the necessity to create human-mediated systems where the robot is in charge of performing (some) tasks autonomously under the human’s supervision and/or by requiring the (occasional) intervention of the users during the interaction. Human knowledge is expected to directly (e.g., through shared control and shared autonomy) and/or indirectly (e.g., through requisite specification) guide robot autonomy in order to realize behaviors that are in line with the desired domain objectives, safe and acceptable by involved human users. However, designing the robot’s behaviors mediated by the humans as well as defining how and when to merge human knowledge with the robot’s capabilities is still an opening challenge that requires collaboration and dialogue among different figures. In this respect, research should push the design and development of novel technologies, methodologies, and models that facilitate communication, and sharing of knowledge among the different stakeholders (e.g., roboticists, domain experts, and end-users) as well as facilitate the integration of the resulting (potentially conflicting) requirements. This special issue, therefore, aims at collecting contributions from different stakeholders concerning the design and deployment of novel human-mediated robotic services in real-world scenarios. In this regard, this special issue is open to both methodological and technical contributions. The former may propose innovative participatory design approaches capable of capturing the requirements of different viewpoints. The latter may propose novel technologies or approaches capable of synthesizing flexible and socially-compliant (interacting) behaviors of robots.
The peer-reviewed international journal Art, Design & Communication in Higher Education seeks submissions for a Special Issue on place-based learning entitled ‘Exploring Situatedness’. This call is a partnership with the European Institute of Arts (ELIA) in alignment with the theme for the ELIA Academy in Portugal in May 2023 (https://elia-artschools.org/page/ELIAAcademy2023). For the purposes of this call, place-based learning is defined as 'higher education educational experiences that intentionally integrate local communities and environments as one of the primary resources for learning art, design and communication'. We welcome submissions from individuals working within and beyond the academy, including artists, researchers, scholars, community organizers, professors, administrators and public policy advocates. We seek contributions representing a variety of creative contexts and geographical locations, and encourage diverse scholarly approaches, including vernacular research methods and arts-based research. Submissions may focus on (but are not limited to) some of the following: Real-world creative learning problems that position students to think through and act on the issue like experts 'Situatedness' as a conceptual framework Learning embedded within a particular social and physical environment (Lave and Wenger 1991) ‘Learning in and with the world’ (Biesta 2018) The roles of artists and artmaking, designers and designing Engaging local community members as co-designers of, or mentors for, educational experiences Working with/within economically vulnerable and historically impacted communities Creative place-making or creative place-keeping Issues of access, equity, sustainability or maintenance.
There is a global trend towards decentralised and marked-adopted school systems (Pont, 2020). The Nordic education systems exhibit a unique blend of overarching welfare state provisions and local autonomy (Pedersen & Kuhnle, 2017; Prøitz & Aasen, 2017). This combination results in intricate governance chains and tensions within the education system between centralised oversight to ensure equal access and opportunities for all students, aligning with the Nordic ethos of equitable education (Blossing et al., 2014), and local self-determination to address the diverse needs of individual communities within their specific contexts (Jumani & Malik, 2017; Thompson et al., 2021). This tension between centralised control and local autonomy remains a pivotal question for educational research policy in general (Parcerisa et al., 2022) and in the Nordic countries in particular (Nordholm & Adolfsson, 2024). While the Nordic countries represent a unique context of state-funded education systems with universal rights and free access, they also exemplify contrasting approaches to marketisation and decentralisation. For example, Sweden has embraced extensive marketisation affecting educational provision and access (Dahlstedt & Fejes, 2019; Lundahl et al., 2013; Pettersson et al., 2017), while Finland has maintained tight control over market influences (Niemi, 2016; Sahlberg, 2021; Uljens et al., 2016). Norway has also upheld restrictive private school policies but has recently seen a gradual increase in the number of privately enrolled students (Dieudé, 2021; Thuen & Volckmar, 2020). At the same time, international research highlights the impact of educational leadership and the pathways of school leadership on educational outcomes (Leithwood et al., 2019), educational equity (Poekert et al., 2020), and teacher retention (Nguyen et al., 2023).
The promotion of health from early ages is key for the enhancement of public and individual wellness in the long term due to the fact that habits developed in childhood and adolescence tend to be maintained during the whole life. Indeed, detrimental habits established in youth may lead to higher risk for the onset of chronic diseases later in life (Gardner et al., 2020; Henderson et al., 2018; Kleppang et al., 2023; Li et al., 2016; Mayne et al., 2020). On the contrary, structuring positive behaviors in youngsters not only increases the odds of better health in adulthood, but also, consequently, indirectly brings additional benefits both by reducing the health-care costs and increasing individuals’ working effectiveness (Frech, 2012; Palomäki et al., 2018; Previtali et al., 2022; Telama, 2009; Weintraub, 2023). In this sense, both the political and scientific workforces have turned their attention towards health-focused interventions within the school environment. In fact, schools may potentially represent the strongest setting for health education in youth (Society of Health and Physical Educators [SHAPE], 2023). This is essentially due to two main unique characteristics of schools: on the one side, education is obligatory (and mostly free) worldwide, hence, the vast majority of kids attend schools for most of their young life; this allows for interventions to be able to reach most of the youth population. On the other side, schools are usually considered safe environments, therefore, parents and their children are more likely to be open to enroll in programs proposed within their walls. It is common knowledge that some of the main benefits for overall individual health (including its physical, psychological, and social spheres) are due to active behaviors. Participation and adherence in physical activities provides several advantages at early ages, among which improved metabolism, better lipid profile, reduced risk of developing obesity in the short and long term, as well as increased social inclusion or higher psychological wellbeing (Center for Disease Control and Prevention, 2022; World Health Organization, 2022). Again, schools offer an excellent environment for fostering active behaviors in kids, particularly thanks to the physical education subject. Additionally, the concept of “comprehensive school physical activity program” (SHAPE, 2023) has been integrated into school policies worldwide: the general idea is that kids should be active not only during physical education (which in most countries constitutes only a small portion of the weekly school program), but also during recess, through after-school programs carried out in the school facilities, and even during regular classes from other subjects.
Apertura invites experts in educational innovation in virtual learning environments to send article proposals to be included in volume 17, number 1, which will be published in April 2025.