Computers and Classroom Culture, first published in 1996, explores the meaning of computer technology for our schools.

As important as it is to realize the potential of computer technology to improve education, it is just as important to understand how the social organization of schools and classrooms influences the use of computers, and in turn is affected by that technology in unanticipated ways. In Computers and Classroom Culture, Janet Schofield observes the fascinating dynamics of the computer-age classroom. Among her many discoveries, Schofield describes how the use of an artificially-intelligent tutor in a geometry class unexpectedly changes aspects such as the level of peer competition and the teacher's grading practices. She also discusses why many teachers fail to make significant instructional use of computers and how gender appears to have a crucial impact on students' reactions to computer use. All educators, sociologists, and psychologists concerned with educational computing and the changing shape of the classroom will find themselves compellingly engaged.

Impelled by a demand for increasing American strength in the new global economy, many educators, public officials, business leaders, and parents argue that school computers and Internet access will improve academic learning and prepare students for an information-based workplace. But just how valid is this argument? In Oversold and Underused, one of the most respected voices in American education argues that when teachers are not given a say in how the technology might reshape schools, computers are merely souped-up typewriters and classrooms continue to run much as they did a generation ago. In his studies of early childhood, high school, and university classrooms in Silicon Valley, Larry Cuban found that students and teachers use the new technologies far less in the classroom than they do at home, and that teachers who use computers for instruction do so infrequently and unimaginatively. Cuban points out that historical and organizational economic contexts influence how teachers use technical innovations. Computers can be useful when teachers sufficiently understand the technology themselves, believe it will enhance learning, and have the power to shape their own curricula. But these conditions can't be met without a broader and deeper commitment to public education beyond preparing workers. More attention, Cuban says, needs to be paid to the civic and social goals of schooling, goals that make the question of how many computers are in classrooms trivial.

The classroom is the primary laboratory for educational development and its culture and dynamics are of no small importance. This new book presents carefully selected global analyses of important issues in classroom development from emotional intelligence to information technology to presentation of learning styles and strategies and psychological motivation.

Mathematics teaching and learning have been dominated by a concern for the intellectual readiness of the child, debates over rote learning versus understanding and, recently, mathematical processes and thinking. The gaze into today's mathematics classroom is firmly focused on the individual learner. Recently, however, studies of mathematics in social practices, including the market place and the home, have initiated a shift of focus. Culture has become identified as a key to understanding the basis on which the learner appropriates meaning. The chapters in this timely book attempt to engage with this shift of focus and offer original contributions to the debate about mathematics teaching and learning. They adopt theoretical perspectives while drawing on the classroom as both the source of investigation and the site of potential change and development. The book will be of fundamental interest to lecturers and researchers and to teachers concerned with the classroom as a cultural phenomenon.

This special issue provides a set of articles written by former colleagues and friends of Jan Hawkins--a member of a talented group of graduate students who participated in the weekly seminars held in what was then referred to as the Institute for Comparative Development during the mid-1970s. The single theme that brought together this diverse group of scholars and that dominates the papers in this issue is the belief in the value of human diversity not only as a resource for understanding human nature, but as a necessity for continued human development. The articles and commentaries testify that the ideas, practices, and values that Jan Hawkins helped to create in the mid-1970s are now found around the world.

The contributors use teachers' accounts together with their own research to examine how the use of computers in school can affect the ways in which children learn and teachers teach.