Jim Parziale is a part-time professor at the Graduate School of Education at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, and a teacher and science resource teacher for Brookline Public School, Brookline, Massachusetts. He has an Ed.D. in human development and psychology from Harvard University and has won many awards for teaching excellence. His primary research interests are the process of knowledge construction during classroom science activities and the self-organization of children and adults' knowledge with interrelations to the environments in which problems are solved.