The Social Utility Theory as Applied to Arithmetic, its Research Basis, and Some of its Implications

Raising Middle School Math Standards without Raising Anxiety

“…(National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, 2000, p. 12) The math-for-the-elite myths-perceptions by both students and teachers that the powerful ideas of mathematics are inaccessible to most-handicapped learning and curriculum development for decades. Throughout the first two-thirds of the 20th Century, mathematics reform tended toward a twotrack curriculum, with most students learning shopand-trade skills and only the elite few receiving a solid mathematical foundation (see Wilson, 1948). In fact, for several decades math reformers advocated later and later introduction of even basic procedures such as multiplying and dividing, citing the "mental ages" of pre-high school students as evidence of their inability to learn the concepts (Washburne, 1931;Brownell, 1938).…”