Teaching Mathematics in the 21st Century. Responding to a Bigger World

The “new math,” as it was popularly called, emphasized mathematics structure. Students studied sets, number systems, different number bases, and number sentences. Teachers guided children to discover concepts rather than lecturing about them. While many ideas of the new math had merit, application may have been flawed. Textbooks were often hard to read and overly formal. Many parents complained that they could not understand their children’s homework.

In the meantime, the social revolution of the 1960s and 1970s flooded colleges with students—many from backgrounds and groups that traditionally had not attended college. To what extent this new college population affected test scores remains unclear, but between 1963 and 1975 SAT scores declined, leading to several major concerns for the mathematics curriculum in the final decades of the century, including how to:

• upgrade the curriculum to match the demands of an increasingly technological society,
• balance student needs with the needs of society and of mathematics itself, and
• teach the expanded curriculum to all of the students.

There were no easy answers. A back-to-the-basics movement called for a return to traditional mathematics—teacher lectures, drills, and tests. But many argued that traditional approaches had worked for no more than 5% to 15% of the students; what was needed was a challenging mathematics curriculum that prepared every student to think mathematically—to develop the foundations in mathematical reasoning, concepts, and tools needed for advanced mathematics education as well as enlightened living in the age of technology.

The National Council of Supervisors of Mathematics (NCSM) responded with a list of basic skills (1977) and later with “Essential Mathematics for the Twenty-first Century ”(1989). NCTM did the same, producing an Agenda for Action in 1980, the first version of the Curriculum and Evaluation Standards in 1989, and now the Standards 2000 document, Principles and Standards for School Mathematics, compiled with the input of thousands of mathematics teachers responding over the World Wide Web. Some major points of consensus between the NCSM and the NCTM recommendations include the following:

• that all students benefit from a challenging mathematics curriculum;
• that mathematics reasoning and higher-order thinking skills should be integral to the curriculum;
• that problem solving should be a priority;
• that algebraic thinking, geometry, statistics and probability are essential rather than add-on skills;
• that the emphasis in computation should be on meaning and patterns;
• that communication of mathematical ideas in a variety of ways (oral, written, symbolic language, everyday language) is critical to the learning process;
• that students need opportunities to explore and apply mathematics in hands-on and real-life activities.