Dawn Teuscher recently published an article with some colleagues. The article was titled “Discontinuity in Enacted Scope and Sequence of Middle Grades Mathematics Content” in the Journal of Mathematics Education Leadership. Dawn has answered a few questions about this article below:
Who were your co-authors on this article?
Lisa Kasmer, Travis Olson, and Shannon Dingman
Who would you say is the target audience for this article?
State and district mathematics leaders
What is the big problem you hoped to address with this article?
The purpose of the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics was to assist states in teaching similar content across states. With the intention of students learning similar content regardless of the state they lived in. However, what we found is that although students may be learning similar content it is being taught at very different times during the school year. Therefore, students are making or not making connections between different mathematical topics.
What are some of the key ideas in the article?
We found that geometric transformations is taught at different times across four states. Not only that it is taught at different times, but it is taught at the beginning of the school year, in the middle of the school year, and near the end of the school year. This is problematic because students are not able to make the same connections among the different mathematics concepts. We also found that some teachers’ decision to teach geometric transformations at various times was because they did not see connections to other mathematics content.
What are some of the main ideas you hope your audience will take from the article?
As state and district mathematics leaders make decisions about the order to sequence mathematics topics they need to be aware of the connections among mathematics topics. One problem in mathematics is that often most students do not see connections among the different concepts they learn. Each chapter in the textbook is something new and unrelated to the mathematics they previously learned. However, if we would help teachers see connections among the different mathematical concepts then students may be able to make sense of the mathematics better.
Abstract
The 2010 release of the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics (CCSSM) initiated a tremendous effort to align the mathematics curriculum across the United States. However, the work of enacting these standards, including determining in what order to teach the grade-level standards, was often left to local schools and district experts to determine. These decisions were influenced by several factors and often formalized in scope and sequence documents, which outlined the order in which grade-level standards would be taught and the amount of time devoted to specific mathematical content and skills. In this paper, we report the analysis of eight Grade 8 mathematics teachers’ scope and sequence documents and the underlying factors that influences their development. Given the discrepancies apparent across these eight documents, we discuss the implications stemming from these curricular decisions and recommend district leadership consider the connections across mathematical content when making decisions regarding the sequencing of topics in any grade level.