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Assessments accompanying published textbooks are often used by teachers in the USA as a primary means to evaluate students' mathematical knowledge. In addition to assessing content knowledge, assessments should provide insight into students' ability to engage with mathematical processes such as reasoning, communication, connections, and representations. We report here an analysis of the extent to which the assessments accompanying published textbooks in the USA at the elementary, middle grades, and high school levels provide opportunities for students to engage with these mathematical processes. Results indicate that in elementary grades, communication, connections, and graphics are not consistently emphasized across grade levels and publishers. In middle grades, students are rarely asked to record their reasoning or translate among representational forms of a concept. In high school geometry, students are given many opportunities to interpret and create graphics, but the same is not true for algebra. With the exception of connections, the results suggest that inconsistent emphasis is placed on the mathematical processes within assessments accompanying commercial textbooks in the USA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information on the study of arithmetic functions by using function machines in third grade education in the U.S. The authors look at the focus on numbers, patterns, and their relationships as functions. The article also discusses one student's homemade function machine project and how it gave her confidence in math education.

Nurse executives identified key decision points in their careers. Typical of executive women, they had a general sense of career direction but reported no overall career plan. Nurses in the past have given little attention to formal career planning. Yet emphasis is directed toward professionals developing a more structured career plan. This article discusses a study which explored what career decision points nurse executives encountered. A secondary intention was to determine if these executives had a focused career plan. Eighty-five excellent nurse executives, mostly women, were selected from hospitals throughout the U.S.

Presents letters to the editor on issues related to nursing in the U.S. as of September 1981. Salaries of nurses; Approach to alleviate the nursing shortage; Opinion of nurses on an infant who was starved deliberately.