Problem Posing: Reflections and Applications

As a result of the editors' collaborative teaching at Harvard in the late 1960s, they produced a ground-breaking work -- The Art Of Problem Posing -- which related problem posing strategies to the already popular activity of problem solving. It took the concept of problem posing and created strategies for engaging in that activity as a central theme in mathematics education. Based in part upon that work and also upon a number of articles by its authors, other members of the mathematics education community began to apply and expand upon their ideas. This collection of thirty readings is a testimony to the power of the ideas that originally appeared. In addition to reproducing relevant materials, the editors of this book of readings have included a considerable amount of interpretive text which places the articles in the context of problem solving. While the preponderance of essays focus upon mathematics and mathematics education, some of them point to the relevance of problem posing to other fields such as biology or psychology. In the interpretive text that accompanies each chapter, they indicate how ideas expressed for one audience may be revisited or transformed in order to ready them for a variety of audiences.