Math Methods: Be on the lookout for new findings from Project 2061, the comprehensive research effort of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Researchers Kathleen Morris and Jo Ellen Roseman shared some initial conclusions drawn from their analysis of four videotaped 6th grade math classes in Texas and Delaware.

Kathleen Morris

Jo Ellen Roseman

The lesson, used by all four classes, was designed to help students understand how numbers can be represented in several ways, such as in fraction and decimal form. Using a database on cats, students were asked to identify what percentage of the cats were male and female and what percentage were kittens.

The lesson analysis revealed that students had to first have a solid understanding of “percent as per hundred,” said Morris. As teachers guided students through the problem, it also became clear that creating models and representations was key to students' understanding. So, too, was the need to guide student interpretations and reasoning.

These findings, however, are preliminary. “We are swimming in data right now,” said Roseman, but she and Morris hope to use the lesson analyses to determine the kinds of curricula and instructional methods that can best help students grasp essential mathematical concepts.

Visit the Project 2061 Web site at www.project2061.org for more information.

Conference of the Future:Known primarily for her work as a curriculum-mapping expert, Heidi Hayes Jacobs is, nonetheless, trying her hand at predicting the future. Her vision requires educators to master the technological tools available to them. “For those of you who are afraid of technology—get over it!” Jacobs, as futurist, ordered.

Heidi Hayes Jacobs

Technological savvy is essential for realizing Jacobs' dream of a paperless and wireless Teaching and Learning Conference by the year 2015, for example. And it's technology that will support many of the practices that Jacobs has championed, such as differentiated professional development programs that offer teachers online learning and videoconferencing as options. The content of such programs should be based “on what kids in the [school] building need,” Jacobs asserted. And student growth should be linked directly to teacher growth. Other predictions for 2015:

• Global issues will be infused in the curriculum.
• ASCD will offer international virtual conferences.
• School years will be longer—with more pay.
• Standards will have been reshaped and modernized.
• No Child Left Behind will have been left behind.

A Golden Nugget  From ASCD's 2003 Teaching and Learning Conference  Literacy is the key to students' achievement on standardized tests, asserted Heidi Hayes Jacobs. Follow this link to hear more of her thoughts on literacy, or read the transcript below: Everybody in this room's a language teacher, and don't you forget it. The first point about testing is it's first and foremost based on language capacity. If you can't read these things—it's done; you're fried. It's everybody's problem, not just the English teacher's.