Center for Mathematics Education
A center of
in the
Division of Mathematics
Learning and Teaching
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© Copyright 2004-2006 Education Development Center, Inc. (EDC)
Current projects
Some of our
completed projects
Click on the name of a project to visit its website.
Current Projects
Think Math!
Think Math! is a comprehensive K-5 mathematics curriculum funded by the National Science Foundation. The series, developed under the working title Math Workshop, is published by Harcourt School Publishers, a long time leader in educational publishing. Think Math! does not pit skill against problem solving. Rather, it builds computational fluency through plentiful practice in basic skills as students investigate new ideas and solve meaningful problems. Lessons provide glimpses of ideas to come, letting students build familiarity and develop conceptual understanding as they apply, sharpen, and maintain skills they already have. Think Math! was also designed with teachers in mind, honoring their need, as adults, to have something that attracts and holds their interest, and acknowledging their need, as learners with little available time, to have a learning-by-doing opportunity for professional growth.
K-12 Mathematics Curriculum
Center
The K-12 Mathematics
Curriculum Center, a collaboration with other EDC staff, supports
school districts as they consider and implement new mathematics curricula
that align to the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics' Curriculum
and Evaluation Standards for School Mathematics. The Center offers
a variety of products and services to assist district leadership
with curriculum selection and implementation. Print resources
include Curriculum Summaries; Choosing a Standards-based
Mathematics Curriculum, a guide that suggests a process for considering
new instructional materials; and a collection of Curriculum Perspectives
from teachers, administrators, and developers who use these new programs.
In addition, the Center offers a series of seminars focused on considering
new standards-based curricula, professional development for
successful implementation, and leadership for curricular change.
CME
Project (formerly Mathematical Themes)
Developed by EDC's Center for Mathematics Education, CME Project
is a coherent, four-year, NSF-funded high school program
designed around how knowledge is organized and generated within mathematics:
the themes of algebra, geometry, analysis, probability, and statistics.
Many standard curricula look at each of these areas as sets
of results and techniques. Many integrated programs look at
them as threads that run through varying contexts. CMEP sees these
branches of mathematics not only as compartments for certain kinds
of results, but also as descriptors for methods and approaches -
the habits of mind that determine how knowledge is organized and
generated within mathematics itself. As such, they deserve to be
centerpieces of a curriculum, not its byproducts.
Click here to see a gallery of pictures from the November 2003 CMEP Advisory Board Meeting.
Lesson Study Communities in Secondary
Mathematics
This project provides
two years of professional development and lesson study support
to teams of middle and high school teachers in the Greater Boston
area, as well as building a community of teachers around lesson study
in mathematics. Our goals are to enhance knowledge of mathematics
and pedagogy, introduce teachers to lesson study, build a community
of teachers interested in lesson study, and learn how the Japanese
lesson study model can be adapted to become a successful
professional development model for U.S. secondary school mathematics
teachers. Teacher teams attend workshops at EDC and complete four
or more full cycles of lesson study with the support of a team coach/advisor.
PROMYS for Teachers
Boston University's
Program in Mathematics for Young Scientists (PROMYS) has offered
high school students challenging experiences of mathematical exploration
since 1989. PROMYS and CME are now collaborating on a project that
will extend the PROMYS experience by engaging local high school teachers
in the program's summer activities and by hosting professional
development seminars during the academic year. During the
summer component, teachers and students work together to develop
independent mathematical projects under the supervision of research
mathematicians. These projects are refined for use in the high schools
as enrichment projects to complement the new and emerging curricula.
The participants' work in the summers is supported by daily
discussions and problem sets designed to develop the habits
of thought necessary for creative mathematical research. Projects
are transported back to the high schools where they are presented
and further developed in collaboration with other students. During
the academic follow-up years, seminars for teachers are offered jointly
by CME and the Boston University Mathematics Department. These seminars
are devoted to exploring particular research ideas and how they
can be used to enrich the curricula being used in the
schools.
Some of our completed projects
Number Crew
The Number Crew is a multimedia K-1 mathematics curriculum originally developed for use in the United Kingdom. Public Media Education, Inc. has provided funding for adapting the materials (video, print, and CD-ROM) for use in the U.S.
Seeing the Connections:
Promoting Profound Understanding of Secondary Mathematics
Seeing the Connections was a collaboration of the University of New Hampshire, Stony Brook University, and Education Development Center. The Seeing the Connections staff is producing, piloting, and disseminating curriculum modules for use in mathematics courses that help preservice teachers develop a knowledge of mathematics for teaching. Building on successful NSF-funded proof-of-concept projects, the Seeing the Connections curriculum helps secondary teachers develop important mathematical knowledge and skills required in their future careers---designing effective lessons, emphasizing certain ideas over others, connecting ideas across the grades, understanding germs of insight in students' questions, and placing topics in the precollege curriculum in the broader mathematical landscape.
Problems with a Point
In collaboration with the Math Forum (and initially funded but NSF), this project provides teachers, students, and parents with a searchable Web resource of problems complementing the NSF mathematics curricula grades 6--12. We have designed orchestrated problem sets to help students develop both deep conceptual understanding and technical skills, and to practice, assess, and integrate these concepts and skills. This database classifies problems by topic, difficulty level, and use of computational technology.
Connected Geometry
Connected Geometry
is a geometry curriculum, funded by the National Science Foundation,
designed to help teachers and students engage in meaningful
mathematical activity by offering students a chance to understand
and appreciate the connections and unifying themes within mathematics,
and to build on the connections between students' backgrounds and
mathematics. Currently, the Connected Geometry materials are being incorporated
into the CME Project.
Connecting with Mathematics
This project, in
collaboration with other EDC staff, develops curriculum materials
for use in professional development programs for practicing grade
7-12 mathematics teachers. The curriculum modules are designed to
connect advanced mathematical ideas with problems and contexts that
occur in secondary school curricula. The materials created by the CwM team were published by Corwin Press as
Ways to Think About Mathematics: Activities and Investigations for Grade 6-12 Teachers.
Developing Mathematical Research
Skills
A mathematics research
experience for secondary students seems like a good but
infeasible idea: How can they contribute to a field that builds
on itself the way mathematics does? We have developed a collection
of research projects that allow typical high school students to
engage in a mathematical research experience, involving problems
appropriate to their mathematical backgrounds. While these projects
may not contain new results, they embody a true research experience
in that students can begin with a problem, build a model,
conduct experiments, make conjectures, and work towards a deductive
proof as a final goal.
Mathematical Methods in High
School
The M2HS curriculum
takes seriously the methods by which mathematics is created
and applied. Field-tested with typical high school students, these
materials promote useful mathematical habits of mind, teach techniques
that are rarely taught in school but that technical professionals
use all the time, provide opportunities to think mathematically about
hard problems, and let students and teachers in on the process of
creating, inventing, conjecturing, experimenting, revising, and
proving. The program takes up many traditional topics in
high school mathematics, but its focus is on the mathematical
thinking that underlies the topics. In addition, it treats some areas
that are new to the high school curriculum, including the mathematics
behind the codes that make electronic communications secure, methods
for fitting mathematical functions to a wide variety of
situations, and a historical introduction to the ideas behind calculus. Currently, the Mathematical Methods materials are being incorporated
into the CME Project.
Mathematical Methods in High
School:
A Mathematical Companion
This project is
developing a resource book for teachers centered around the topics
in our Mathematical Methods in High School curriculum. Topics include
mathematical induction, difference calculus, number theory and cryptography,
polynomials, complex numbers, trigonometry, and ideas from
calculus. The materials are specifically designed for teachers,
making connections to secondary classrooms, developing the history
of ideas that led to the major advances, and helping teachers develop
or refresh their understanding of topics that are somewhat new to
the secondary curriculum.
Building Regional
Capacity
This project was a
collaboration among Education Development Center, the University
of Massachusetts at Lowell, and the Eastern Massachusetts Association
of Mathematics Department Heads. We designed and implemented a professional
development program for mathematics department heads and lead teachers
at the 7--12 level. This project's content has four strands:
(1) engaging in new mathematics; (2) developing leadership
skills; (3) planning for and providing professional development
opportunities for teachers in participants' schools or districts;
and (4) understanding new mathematics curricula and the issues involved
in implementing them. At the conclusion of this program we hosted
a national conference to help other leaders throughout the country
design and implement similar programs for building regional
capacity.