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Reflections on Curricular Change

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Mathematics Curriculum in School Education

Part of the book series: Advances in Mathematics Education ((AME))

Abstract

Within any national perspective, curricular change may be viewed as evolutionary, with curricula evolving in ways responsive to the surrounding political and intellectual environments. There is, however, less global coherence than any intra-national perspective might suggest. Historical and political contexts matter, just as ecological niches do in evolutionary biology. This chapter begins with a meta-level discussion describing the consequential nature of (typically national) values, goals, and cultural context and traditions as shapers of curricula. It then proceeds with a discussion of curricular trends in the United States over the past decades, and thumbnail descriptions of changes in the Netherlands, Great Britain, Germany, France, China, and Japan. A concluding discussion reflects on the diversity of curricular directions worldwide, and suggests some ways in which we can profit from it.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    What follows contains broad generalities. I am describing trends, in the way that (for example) Stigler and Hiebert (1999) describe trends.

  2. 2.

    It was this perception that led to the formation of the Mathematical Sciences Education Board (MSEB) at the National Research Council. MSEB “was established in 1985 to provide “a continuing national overview and assessment capability for mathematics education.” (National Research Council 1989, p. ii) The idea was to keep mathematics education from being put back on the “back burner” after the flurry of attention it was getting in the wake of the Japanese “economic miracle” of the 1970s.

  3. 3.

    This is a gross over-simplification. Some of the ideas behind the creation of the New Math, such as attention to mathematical structure and the idea of “hands on” mathematics (parallel to “hands on” activities introduced in all of the alphabet curricula) live on to this day.

  4. 4.

    And, it was controversial, giving rise to the “math wars.” I will not discuss those here; see Schoenfeld (2004, 2007).

  5. 5.

    Roughly speaking, the “traditional” curricula placed significant attention on conceptual and procedural knowledge, focusing on the bodies of skill that students were intended to master, and their conceptual underpinnings. Standards-based curricula placed a greater emphasis on the process standards discussed above: problem solving, communication, reasoning, connections.

  6. 6.

    This was done in part because it makes good sense to have a range of models when trying something new, and in part in order to avoid putting NSF in the position of advancing a “national curriculum,” which would have been extremely dangerous politically (see Schoenfeld 2004, 2007).

  7. 7.

    All curricula have students solve problems, of course. But for pre-standards curricula, those problems were typically exercises similar to the examples students had been shown how to solve. In the new curricula, “problem solving” came to mean working on problems for which the precise solution methods had not been demonstrated.

  8. 8.

    Hugh Burkhardt and I were the lead authors of the SBAC content specifications.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA

    Alan H. Schoenfeld

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  1. Alan H. Schoenfeld
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Correspondence to Alan H. Schoenfeld .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Texas A & M University Dept. Teaching, Learning & Culture, College Station, Texas, USA

    Yeping Li

  2. Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan, USA

    Glenda Lappan

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Schoenfeld, A.H. (2014). Reflections on Curricular Change. In: Li, Y., Lappan, G. (eds) Mathematics Curriculum in School Education. Advances in Mathematics Education. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-7560-2_4

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