Fostering Motivation with an Authentic Task Based Unit on Linear Modeling

This curriculum project was created to provide teachers with additional resources to use when teaching an 8th grade unit on linear modeling. The included activities put an emphasis on grappling with new ideas, communication, and developing understanding through a project using real world mathematics. An embedded goal in the curriculum is to foster student motivation in mathematics. The main topic involves constructing scatter plots, noticing trends in the data, and constructing lines of best fit based on these trends. Recommendations are included by the author for implementing the included activities, as well as a rubric for evaluating the student projects. Aligned Common Core standards are included in the unit plan

The impact of team familiarity and team leader experience on team coordination errors: A panel analysis of professional basketball teams

To explore the dynamics involved in team coordination, we examine the impact of team familiarity and team leader experience on team coordination errors (TCEs). We argue that team familiarity has a U-shaped effect on TCEs. We study the moderating effects of team leader prior experience and team leader team-specific experience on the association between team familiarity and TCEs. We use panel data on teams from the National Basketball Association to test the hypotheses. Our findings support the U-shaped relationship between team familiarity and TCEs and the moderating effect of team leader team-specific experience on this relationship. The paper advances research on errors in organizations by analyzing the antecedents of TCEs, so far an underexplored empirical phenomenon. Moreover, it contributes to research on coordination in teams by empirically examining the interplay between formal and informal coordination mechanisms. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd