This paper documents Pittsburgh's transformation from a typical, adversarial district-union dynamic to one of deep, substantive collaboration over the course of several years. This work has catapulted Pittsburgh to the vanguard of efforts to improve teacher effectiveness, and helped secure more than $80 million in philanthropic and federal grants.…

This paper describes how administrator preparation programs can help future education leaders to value, understand, and use the democratic strategy of deliberative dialogue and action. The purpose of the strategy is to engage in a new way with teachers, parents, and other stakeholders about problems in their local public schools. Follow-up…

One goal of 21st-century education is to develop mature citizens who can identify issues, solve problems, and communicate solutions. What better way for students to learn these skills than by participating in a science and engineering fair? Fair participants face the same challenges as professional scientists and engineers, even Nobel laureates.…

In France, project activities figure predominantly in technology education. The general idea behind learning based on project activity is to allow the pupil to get involved in the activity in question, with the pupil tackling real situations rather than ones of an abstract nature. But too often, we notice that the pedagogical strategies used by…

Task-based learning has been recommended in immersion classes in order to provide relief from the usual teacher-fronted lessons and increase the opportunities for student output. This paper presents one aspect of the data collected during the on-going evaluation of a late partial immersion French programme in an Australian school. It presents the…

Students often struggle with how to translate textbook concepts into real-world applications that allow them to personally experience the importance of these concepts. This is an ongoing challenge within all disciplines in higher education. To address this, faculty design their courses using methods beyond traditional classroom lectures to…

Prime numbers are important as the building blocks for the set of all natural numbers, because prime factorisation is an important and useful property of all natural numbers. Students can discover them by using the method known as the Sieve of Eratosthenes, named after the Greek geographer and astronomer who lived from c. 276-194 BC. Eratosthenes…

A colleague was moving, and someone on the professional moving crew, upon hearing she was a mathematician, asked what happens when you repeatedly transfer water back and forth between two classes using a straw. The question is simple to solve if you alternate which glass you transfer from and to, but if more general patters are allowed, some…

The purpose of this article is to suggest an expansion of the conceptualizations and measurement of applied problem solving and, relatedly, coping. The author discusses the evolution of his programmatic line of research over the last 30 years to illustrate the changing landscape in applied problem solving and, to a lesser extent, in the coping…

Industry has indicated the desire for academic programs to produce graduates that are well-versed in collaborative problem solving and general project management concepts in addition to technical skills. The primary focus of a curriculum is typically centered on the technical training with minimal attention given to coalescing team and project…

A generalization of a well-known result for the arctangent function poses a number of interesting questions concerning the existence of integer solutions of related problems.

In responding to the research on conceptual change, this article attempts to make two points. First, scientific concepts are not possessed by individuals; rather, they are part of a culture's resources, which individuals learn to use for their own or for group purposes. Second, particular concepts are most effectively mastered when the learner is…

An elementary proof by contradiction of the Collatz Conjecture (CC) (also known as the "3X + 1" Conjecture), is presented. A modified form of the Collatz transformation is formulated, leading to the concept of a modified Collatz chain. A smallest counterexample N[subscript 0] is hypothesized; the existence of N[subscript 0] implies that…

"Creativity for a New Curriculum: 5-11" provides an account of what creativity really means in the context of children's learning in the primary school, and describes in practical terms what teachers can do to foster it. At a time of curriculum development and change, it focuses on the opportunity to build a new curriculum that is inclusive of…

Americans have long recognized that investments in public education contribute to the common good, enhancing national prosperity and supporting stable families, neighborhoods, and communities. Education is even more critical today, in the face of economic, environmental, and social challenges. Today's children can meet future challenges if their…