Schoenfeld A. Mathematical Thinking and Problem Solving 2016

Textbook in PDF format

This book is the product of multiple and overlapping communities: the community of scholars at large; the mathematicians, mathematics educators and cognitive scientists who contributed to our conference discussions about mathematical thinking and problem solving, and who contributed the chapters to this book; the local community at Berkeley, which took care of everything from arranging logistical details at the conference to making and transcribing tapes; and the myriad people involved in producing the book itself.
In the early 1980s there was virtually no serious communication among the various groups that contribute to mathematics education - mathematicians, mathematics educators, classroom teachers, and cognitive scientists. Members of these groups came from different traditions, had different perspectives, and rarely gathered in the same place to discuss issues of common interest. Part of the problem was that there was no common ground for the discussions - given the disparate traditions and perspectives.
As one way of addressing this problem, the Sloan Foundation funded two conferences in the mid-1980s, bringing together members of the different communities in a ground clearing effort, designed to establish a base for communication. In those conferences, interdisciplinary teams reviewed major topic areas and put together distillations of what was known about them.*
A more recent conference - upon which this volume is based - offered a forum in which various people involved in education reform would present their work, and members of the broad communities gathered would comment on it. The focus was primarily on college mathematics. The main issues of the conference were mathematical thinking and problem solving