Author: Paul Horwitz
To prepare students for the 21st century workforce, we must teach them to work effectively in teams, keeping in mind that team members may be in the same room or on different continents. Although working collaboratively is widely recognized as an effective and efficient way to use a company’s manpower, most classroom work continues to […]
At the Concord Consortium our goal is to prepare students to ask questions and use mental models to answer them. Students who develop this habit of mind early on will, we hope, become engaged and scientifically literate adults. And surely they will not lack for important questions to ask! Here’s an example: According to a […]
There are three kinds of mathematics: the math that’s taught, the math that’s learned, and the math that’s needed in the 21st century STEM workplace. With support from the Advanced Technological Education Program at the National Science Foundation, Michael Hacker, Co-Director of the Center for STEM Research at Hofstra University, and I organized a conference […]
Paul Horwitz, senior scientist, got his start in research earlier than most — when he was three! We’ve enjoyed his stories for many years. This one was too good not to share. One day at lunch we decided to follow up on his memories and dig a little deeper. We contacted Lindsey Wyckoff at Bank […]
They’re the in thing, especially for teaching science. Everyone, it seems, is fascinated by the potential of educational games. They’re interactive and “multimedia,” they can adapt to individual students, they promote “authentic learning.” In short, they match the outsize expectations of a digital world. They’re definitely cool, but do they teach, and if so, what […]
Scientific theories differ from other belief systems in that they are testable; in other words, they can be disproved. Imagine reading, for instance, any of the following headlines: “Modern Chicken Fossil Found Side By Side with Dinosaur Bones” “Chimpanzee DNA Radically Different From Human” “New Data Shows Earth Only 10,000 [or 100,000 or 10,000,000] Years […]