[5] Following the British government's acquisition and nationalization of several of Pearson's aviation, fuel, and energy divisions in the early 1940s,[8][9] the diversified multinational conglomerate entered the education market.

[21] It sold Silver Burdett Ginn Religion, a Catholic publishing division it operated under the Scott Foresman imprint, to RCL Benziger in 2007.

[31] In 2019, Pearson announced it would begin the process of phasing out the publishing of printed textbooks, in a plan to move into a more digital first strategy.

[6] In 2019, Pearson sold its US K-12 courseware business to the private equity firm Nexus Capital Management,[32][33] which rebranded it as Savvas Learning Company.

[36] In 2022, Pearson Education announced that they intended to sell their digital textbooks as NFTs, in order to profit from secondhand sales.

[47] The site features free articles, blogs, and podcasts on IT topics and products, as well as a bookstore carrying all titles from its imprints.

[47] In 2001, the Pearson Technology Group and O'Reilly Media LLC formed a joint partnership called Safari Books Online, to offer a web-based electronic library of technical and business books from InformIT's imprint partners and O'Reilly Media.

[53] In 2007, the company developed the youth-oriented online quest game Poptropica, through its Family Education Network.

In 2015, Pearson's Family Education Network, along with Poptropica, were sold to the London-based investment group Sandbox Partners.

[54] In 2010, Pearson purchased Cogmed,[55][56] a brain fitness and working memory training program founded in 1999 by Swedish researcher Torkel Klingberg.

[59] In 2016, Pearson acquired StatCrunch, a statistical analysis tool created by Webster West in 1997.

[60] In 2007, Pearson partnered with four other higher-education publishers to create CourseSmart, a company developed to sell college textbooks in eTextbook format on a common platform.

[61] In 2011, Pearson obtained a five-year, $32 million contract with the New York State Department of Education to design tests for students in grades 3–8.