Category: Author: Paul Horwitz
As schools across the country begin reopening for the new school year, we are faced with the possibility that the situation we lived through in the spring may become, for a while at least, the “new normal.” Due to the frightening level of the COVID-19 virus in many areas, some school buildings remain closed entirely […]
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 […]
In the winter, a fireplace is the coziest place in the house when we need some thermal comfort. It is probably something hard to remove from our living standards and our culture (it is supposed to be the only way Santa comes into your house). But is the concept of fireplace — an ancient way […]
All educational research and assessment are based on inference from evidence. Evidence is constructed from learner data. The quality of this construction is, therefore, fundamentally important. Many educational measurements have relied on eliciting, analyzing, and interpreting students’ constructed responses to assessment questions. New types of data may engender new opportunities for improving the validity and […]
A student designIn a pilot study conducted in December 2012, high school students in an engineering class used our Energy3D CAD tool to do an urban solar design project — they must consider the sun path in four seasons and the existing buildings in th…
I wanted to see if we could roughly log how long users are spending waiting for learner data uploads. The more accurate way to do this is on the client side. However I wanted to try it on the server side so it could be applied in many cases without needing instrumented clients that send […]
About four years ago, I dreamed about how multicore computing could push educational computing into a high-performance era. It turns out that the progress in multicore computing has been slow. The computer I am using to write this blog post has four ph…