Studies of teachers’ use of mathematics curriculum materials are particularly timely given the current availability of reform-inspired curriculum materials and the increasingly widespread practice of mandating the use of a single curriculum to regulate mathematics teaching. A review of the research on mathematics curriculum use over the last 25 years reveals significant variation in findings and in theoretical foundations. The aim of this review is to examine the ways that central constructs of this body of research—such as curriculum use, teaching, and curriculum materials—are conceptualized and to consider the impact of various conceptualizations on knowledge in the field. Drawing on the literature, the author offers a framework for characterizing and studying teachers’ interactions with curriculum materials.

This paper presents a model of teachers' construction of mathematics curriculum in the classroom or their curriculum development activities. The model emerged through a qualitative study of two experienced, elementary teachers during their first year of using a commercially published, reform-oriented textbook that had been adopted by their district (Remillard 1996). The aim of the study was to examine teachers' interactions with a new textbook in order to gain insight into the potential for curriculum materials to contribute to reform in mathematics teaching. The resulting model integrates research on teachers' use of curriculum materials (cf. Stodolsky 1989) and studies of teachers' construction of curriculum in their classrooms (cf. Doyle 1993). The model includes three arenas in which teachers engage in curriculum development: design, construction, and curriculum mapping. Each arena defines a particular realm of the curriculum development process about which teachers explicitly or implicitly make different types of decisions. The design arena involves selecting and designing mathematical tasks. The construction arena involves enacting these tasks in the classroom and responding to students' encounters with them. The curriculum mapping arena involves determining the organization and content of the entire curriculum into which daily events fit. Through articulating each piece of the model, the author highlights the complex and multidimensional nature of teachers' curriculum processes, identifies significant characteristics of each arena that have implications for textbook use and instructional change, and indicates areas that call for further understanding and research.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. National Council of Teachers of Mathematics is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Journal for Research in Mathematics Education. This study was prompted by the current availability of newly designed mathematics curriculum materials for elementary teachers. Seeking to understand the role that reform-oriented curricula might play in supporting teacher learning, we studied the ways in which 8 teachers in the same school used one such curriculum, Investigations in Number, Data, and Space (TERC, 1998). Findings revealed that teachers had orientations toward using curriculum materials that influenced the way they used them regardless of whether they agree with the mathematical vision within the materials. As a result, different uses of the curriculum led to different opportunities for student and teacher learning. Inexperienced teachers were most likely to take a piloting stance toward the curriculum and engage all of its resources fully. Findings suggest that reform efforts might include assisting teachers in examining unfamiliar curriculum resources and developing new approaches to using these materials.A curriculum is more for teachers than it is for pupils. If it cannot change, move, perturb, inform teachers, it will have no effect on those whom they teach. It must be first and foremost a curriculum for teachers. If it has any effect on pupils, it will have it by virtue of having had an effect on teachers. (Bruner, 1960(Bruner, /1977 Since Jerome Bruner wrote these words in the preface to a new edition of The Process of Education, mathematics education has witnessed two flurries of curriculum material development aimed at fomenting change in mathematics

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