Alan H. Schoenfeld

Alan H. Sloane

In the early 1980s there was virtually no serious communication among the various groups that contribute to mathematics education -- mathematicians, mathematics educators, classroom teachers, and cognitive scientists. Members of these groups came from different traditions, had different perspectives, and rarely gathered in the same place to discuss issues of common interest. Part of the problem was that there was no common ground for the discussions -- given the disparate traditions and perspectives. As one way of addressing this problem, the Sloan Foundation funded two conferences in the mid-1980s, bringing together members of the different communities in a ground clearing effort, designed to establish a base for communication. In those conferences, interdisciplinary teams reviewed major topic areas and put together distillations of what was known about them.* A more recent conference -- upon which this volume is based -- offered a forum in which various people involved in education reform would present their work, and members of the broad communities gathered would comment on it. The focus was primarily on college mathematics, informed by developments in K-12 mathematics. The main issues of the conference were mathematical thinking and problem solving.

Mathematical Thinking and Problem Solving

Teachers try to help their students learn. But why do they make the particular teaching choices they do? What resources do they draw upon? What accounts for the success or failure of their efforts? In How We Think, esteemed scholar and mathematician, Alan H. Schoenfeld, proposes a groundbreaking theory and model for how we think and act in the classroom and beyond. Based on thirty years of research on problem solving and teaching, Schoenfeld provides compelling evidence for a concrete approach that describes how teachers, and individuals more generally, navigate their way through in-the-moment decision-making in well-practiced domains. Applying his theoretical model to detailed representations and analyses of teachers at work as well as of professionals outside education, Schoenfeld argues that understanding and recognizing the goal-oriented patterns of our day to day decisions can help identify what makes effective or ineffective behavior in the classroom and beyond.

A Theory of Goal-oriented Decision Making and Its Educational Applications

How We Think

Andrea A. diSessa

Frederick Reif

Marjorie Gardner

James G. Greeno

This volume supports the belief that a revised and advanced science education can emerge from the convergence and synthesis of several current scientific and technological activities including examples of research from cognitive science, social science, and other discipline-based educational studies. The anticipated result: the formation of science education as an integrated discipline.

Toward a Scientific Practice of Science Education

James J. Kaput

Ed Dubinsky

Volume III of Research in Collegiate Mathematics Education (RCME) presents state-of-the-art research on understanding, teaching, and learning mathematics at the post-secondary level. This volume contains information on methodology and research concentrating on these areas of student learning: Problem solving - included here are three different articles analyzing aspects of Schoenfeld's undergraduate problem-solving instruction. The articles provide new detail and insight on a well-known and widely discussed course taught by Schoenfeld for many years. Understanding concepts - these articles feature a variety of methods used to examine students' understanding of the concept of a function and selected concepts from calculus. The conclusions presented offer unique and interesting perspectives on how students learn concepts.Understanding proofs - this section provides insight from a distinctly psychological framework. Researchers examine how existing practices can foster certain weaknesses. They offer ways to recognize and interpret students' proof behaviors and suggest alternative practices and curricula to build more powerful schemes. The section concludes with a focused look at using diagrams in the course of proving a statement.

Research in Collegiate Mathematics Education III

This volume is a result of mathematicians, cognitive scientists, mathematics educators, and classroom teachers combining their efforts to help address issues of importance to classroom instruction in mathematics. In so doing, the contributors provide a general introduction to fundamental ideas in cognitive science, plus an overview of cognitive theory and its direct implications for mathematics education. A practical, no-nonsense attempt to bring recent research within reach for practicing teachers, this book also raises many issues for cognitive researchers to consider.

Alan H. Schoenfeld

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