A review of the many research projects on how prior knowledge affects learning. Generally, having old knowledge to which new knowledge may be attached greatly assists learning the new.

Most adults find it difficult to keep an exercise programme going; but active children become active adults. The benefits, and the limits, are spelt out.

Here are the voices of 50 women who are seldom heard – working class mothers – commenting on their own schooling and that of their children.

Listening to parents and teachers and then working on ways to close the gap between their widely differing expectations.

Modern industry needs literate workers. How literate? How can workers' literacy be improved? What can schools learn about necessary literacy and what they teach? Investigations with BHP workers help find answers.

Are schools able to prepare children for the stresses of unemployment? This follow-up study of school leavers, seven years later, looks at the effects of finding yourself in an unsatisfactory job, and of being unemployed 'doing nothing in particular'.

As industry has restructured itself, become leaner and meaner, attitudes to work have changed. In the USA worried corporation heads have called for schools to teach children to be good workers. The trends are enumerated and the reasons exposed.

This chapter from The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language (a marvellous resource for schools) is reproduced by permission. It summarises physiology, experiments and conflicting theories, and explains current knowledge.

This classic research is reprinted from set No.1, 1983 because it has lost none of its relevance today. In suburbs where classes were increasing and decreasing in size, the effects of crowding on attending, withdrawing, and aggressive behaviour were discovered.

Regular racegoers, despite some low IQ scores, use, in that real world, extremely complex multivariate reasoning to pick winners. This research into IQ, expertise, and cognitive complexity has become a classic. New, further, discoveries are promised for set No.2.