Pearson Education

Pearson Education
Parent company Pearson PLC
Founded 1998
Country of origin United States
Headquarters location New York City, New York
Publication types Books
Number of employees 40,000 (2009)
Official website www.pearsoned.com

Pearson Education is a British-owned education publishing and assessment service to schools and corporations, as well as directly to students. Pearson owns educational media brands including Addison–Wesley, BBC Active, Bug Club, eCollege, Fronter, Longman, MyEnglishLab, Penguin Readers, Smarthinking, Prentice Hall, Poptropica and Financial Times Press.

Pearson is part of Pearson PLC, which also owns the Financial Times. It was created in 1998 when Pearson PLC purchased the education division of Simon & Schuster from Viacom and merged it with its own education division, Addison-Wesley Longman to form Pearson Education. Pearson Education was rebranded to Pearson in 2011, and split into an International and a North American division.

Though Pearson generates approximately 60% of its sales in North America, they operate in more than 70 countries. Pearson International is headquartered in London with offices across Europe, Asia and South America. Their online chat support is based in the Philippines.

Pearson North America is headquartered in New York City, New York.[1] They were formerly located in Upper Saddle River, New Jersey.[2]

Imprints

Pearson has a number of publishing imprints:

Partnerships

Pearson has partnered with five other higher-education publishers to create CourseSmart, a company developed to sell college textbooks in eTextbook format on a common platform.[4] In 2010, Pearson agreed to a 5 year, $32 million, contract with the New York State Department of Education to design tests for students in grades 4-8.

GreyCampus partnered with Pearson for higher-education teaching-learning solutions under the Learningware brand.[5]

"Pineapple-Gate"

In the spring of 2012, tests that Pearson designed for the NYSED were found to contain over 30 errors, which caused controversy. One of the most prominent featured a passage about a talking pineapple on the 8th Grade ELA test (revealed to be based from Daniel Pinkwater's The Story of the Rabbit and the Eggplant, with the eggplant changed into a pineapple). After public outcry, the NYSED announced it would not count the questions in scoring.[6] Other errors included a miscalculated question on the 8th Grade Mathematics test regarding astronomical units, a 4th grade math question with two correct answers, errors in the 6th grade ELA scoring guide, and over twenty errors on foreign language math tests.[7]

Technology products

Competitors

Pearson operates globally and has a range of competitors, both worldwide and in each country in which it operates. In the United States, its main K-12 competitors include Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and McGraw-Hill Education, a former division of the McGraw Hill Companies, Inc which was sold off as a separate unit in 2013. International competitors include Macmillan Education, a division of Georg von Holtzbrinck Publishing Group.

Harcourt Assessment acquisition

Pearson announced the acquisition of Harcourt Assessment in May 2007.[10] The Harcourt Assessment business was merged into the Assessment & Information group in January 2008 after a review by the U.S. Department of Justice was completed.[11]

Cogmed

Main article: cogmed

Pearson owns Cogmed, a brain fitness and working memory training program founded in 1999 by Swedish researcher Torkel Klingberg.[12][13]

See also

Notes and references

External links