What does it mean for my child to understand mathematics?
Mission Statements
Our mission at Lewis Central, as partner with home and community, is to empower all learners to excel in a rapidly changing world by offering stimulating and diverse learning experiences, which result in changed lives and a commitment to help others.
The mission of the K-12 Mathematics Program at Lewis Central is for students to recognize that multiple mathematical relationships can exist within a given situation, to think flexibly about those relationships in order to choose effective strategies, and to justify mathematical decisions.
Common Core
Our Mathematics Content Standards define what students should understand and be able to do in their study of mathematics. Asking a student to understand something means asking a teacher to assess whether the student has understood it. But what does mathematical understanding look like? One hallmark of mathematical understanding is the ability to justify, in a way appropriate to the student’s mathematical maturity, why a particular mathematical statement is true or where a mathematical rule comes from. There is a world of difference between a student who can summon a mnemonic device to expand a product such as (a + b)(x + y) and a student who can explain where the mnemonic comes from. The student who can explain the rule understands the mathematics, and may have a better chance to succeed at a less familiar task such as expanding (a + b + c)(x + y). Mathematical understanding and procedural skill are equally important, and both are assessable using mathematical tasks of sufficient richness.
Enduring Understandings
Students and teachers will understand that: Overall Understandings:
Problem solving requires the recognition of relationships.
Making predictions, inferences, and decisions depends on analyzing and interpreting numerical data.
Multiple representations can describe real world situations.
Symbolic notation translates real world situations into mathematical language.
Mathematical Practices
The Standards for Mathematical Practice describe varieties of expertise that mathematics educators at all levels seek to develop in their students. These practices rest on important "processes and proficiencies" with longstanding importance in mathematics education. The first of these are the NCTM (National Council of Mathematics Teachers) process standards of problem solving, reasoning and proof, communication, representation, and connections. The second are the strands of mathematical proficiency specified in the National Research Council’s report Adding It Up: adaptive reasoning, strategic competence, conceptual understanding (comprehension of mathematical concepts, operations and relations), procedural fluency (skill in carrying out procedures flexibly, accurately, efficiently and appropriately), and productive disposition (habitual inclination to see mathematics as sensible, useful, and worthwhile, coupled with a belief in diligence and one’s own efficacy).