eMail: paul@concord.org
Senior Scientist
The Concord Consortium
A.B. (Physics), Harvard College, 1960
M.A. (Physics), Columbia University, 1963
Ph.D. (Physics), New York University, 1967
Dr. Horwitz is a theoretical physicist with broad interests in the application of technology to science and mathematics education. He was Principal Investigator on the ThinkerTools Project, sponsored by the National Science Foundation, which designed a curriculum and associated software that successfully taught the elements of Newtonian physics to students at the sixth grade level. He also recently directed a project that explored the use of computer-based environments for teaching the fundamental concepts of Special Relativity to high school students. This project produced a simulated "relativity laboratory" called RelLab which won two EDUCOM Higher Education Software Awards in 1992, one for Best Natural Science Software (Physics), the other for Best Design. Other recent educational projects with which Dr. Horwitz has been involved have covered the domains of statistics, mathematical chaos theory, and visual modeling.
Dr. Horwitz is the Principal Investigator on several related NSF projects that are exploring students’ difficulties in reasoning about topics in biology. One of these projects has produced a "computer-based manipulative" called GenScope™, that links representations of genetic processes at the DNA, chromosome, cellular, organism, pedigree, and population levels in such a way that changes made at any level are automatically reflected in all the rest. GenScope™ has been evaluated extensively both urban and suburban high schools and with a wide range of student populations. Work is currently underway on BioLogica™, an application similar to GenScope™ but with applications to additional topics in biology and the ability to embed curriculum and assessment materials within the software.