List of Contents
Winter 2013/2014
Democratizing Mathematical Creativity Through Koestler’s Bisociation Theory
Vrunda Prabhu, Bronislaw Czarnocha
The “act of creation” of Koestler & theories of learning in math education research
William Baker, Bronislaw Czarnocha
Middle Grades Mathematics Instruction in China: A Case Study
Su Liang
Editorial
The Winter 2013/2014 issue of the Mathematics Teaching-Research Journal on line further explores the qualities of Chinese teaching and learning mathematics. To complement the presentations of Chinese mathematics teachers published in the October 2013 issue of mtrj, Brian Evans discusses here the relationship between organization of mathematics education in Singapore, one of the top achieving nations on international tests PISA and TIMSS, and in US. Su Liang on the other hand looks into details of Chinese mathematics classrooms in 6 middle schools to investigate the qualities of teaching which enable Chinese students to consistently outperform their US counterparts on international mathematics tests. Ultimately both Brian Evans and Su Liang are asking the same question: What is the secret of success of Chinese education?
The second issue brought forward in this V6 N4 of MTRJ on line is the discovery of Arthur Koestler’s theory of the Act of Creation (1964) for mathematics education. This discovery was made by our colleague co-editor of MTRJ, Vrunda Prabhu, before she passed away. As she was participating in the collaborative CUNY/C3IRG 7 grantsupported teaching experiment on problem solving in 2010/2011, she also created her special version of the project introducing Koestler’s bisociation into instruction. However only recently, while preparing a Mathematics Teaching-Research book for the Sense publisher, we realized the depth and importance of Prabhu’s discovery of Koestler for mathematics education. The short two papers are the beginning of the exploration of mathematics creativity through a new and bright lens, that of bisociation, of the Aha moment. It is exciting to discover that our colleagues from computer creativity are also focusing on Koestler’s formulation as promising the creative mining of the data.
Could creativity become the main craft of the 21st century?
This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.
