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The integrated macroeconomic accounts (IMAs), produced jointly by the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) and the Federal Reserve Board (FRB), present a sequence of accounts that relate income, saving, investment in real and financial assets, and asset revaluations to changes in net worth. In this paper we first provide some background information on the IMAs and on their construction. Next, we discuss the usefulness of the IMAs, focusing for instance on the evolution of household net worth and its components, a set of series that has appeared frequently in discussions of the causes and effects of the recent financial crisis.We also discuss some of the challenges associated with integrating nonfinancial and financial data sources, that is, the current and capital accounts statistics from BEA's national income and product accounts (NIPAs) and the financial account statistics from FRB's flow of funds accounts (FFAs). In the final section, we discuss future plans for improving the IMAs, including a proposed framework and methodology for breaking out the financial business sector into three subsectors: 1) Central bank, 2) Insurance and pension funds, and 3) Other financial business. Background and evolution

This paper is about releasing the social imagination through art in education. This research examines possibilities to use the aesthetic experience as a means to awaken students’ consciousness for advancing democratic values, including multiple perspectives, freedom, and responsibility. Drawing from Maxine Greene’s (1995, 2001) philosophy of social imagination and aesthetic education, this inquiry aims to enrich discourse in the field of curriculum studies, creativity, and citizenship education. Six educators initiated a social imagination project separately. They designed, implemented, and assessed a semester-long project founded in Greene’s philosophy of social imagination. The participants challenged habitual ways of thinking about self/other, culture, and community through active engagement between art and the subject. The aesthetic encounters with art (a) fostered the participants’ wide-awakeness about the society and (b) engaged participants to imagining “things as if they could be otherwise” (Greene, 1995:p. 16). An emphasis on the aesthetic experience through art contributes to advancing democratic values in a pluralistic society.

A significant challenge to the community of chemistry education is the creation of materials that can be used in nonscience settings, including those of social science and humanities classrooms. As part of a larger effort to engage new communities in understanding how science data can impact such settings, including in the community, an experiment to detect the level of nitrogen oxides (NOx) in the air was implemented in university sociology and history classrooms. The use of an authentic scientific method within these settings generated important data for classroom use in classroom sociological and historical discussions. The impact on student attitudes and learning was also determined.

For education leaders (teachers, professors, curriculum designers, and administrators), there are well-documented benefits to using inquiry learning in a wide variety of grade levels, content levels, and contexts. Besides promoting deep learning and critical thinking, inquiry learning is readily adaptable to 21st century skills such as information and communication technologies literacy. However, the combination of sophisticated pedagogy and cutting-edge technologies can be overwhelming to education leaders when planning an inquiry learning curriculum. Faced with a wide variety of technology options, education leaders have little research-based guidance for choosing the ones that are best suited to an inquiry learning curriculum. This chapter reviews recent findings on the use of technology in inquiry learning and provides suggestions and guidelines for incorporating technology in inquiry learning in order to maximize the pedagogical affordances of technology.

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