History of Mathematics Education

What is School?

What is Learning?

What is Curriculum?

Important Events 1850-1920

• 1909 Education became compulsory.

• Steam Engines, Airplanes and the Telephone were invented.

• The field of Psychology was established.

• Darwin’ s Theory of Evolution.

Heroes of the day.

• Andrew Carnegie

• John D. Rockefeller

• J. P. Morgan

• Henry Ford

• Inflation was rampant.

Factory Model

• Our schools are, in a sense, factories in which the raw material(children) are to be shaped and fashioned into products to meet various demands of twentieth-century civilization and it is the business of the school to build its pupils to the specifications that are laid out.

• -Ellwood P. Cubbery - 1910

Factory Model

• Raw Material– Children

• Machinery– Teachers

• Specifications– Curriculum

Efficiency Experts

• Frederick Taylor

• Frank Spaulding

• Franklin Bobbit - Platoon Schools

Spaudling’s Principles

Define quantitative and quantitative standards must be determined for the product.

The material that is acted upon (students) by the labor process passes through a number of progressive stages on its way from raw material to the ultimate product. Definite qualitative and quantitative standards must be determined at each of the stages.

Consequences

Students is solely viewed as a piece of raw material and thus must be controlled at all times.

A preoccupation with testing which overstates what in fact the test may indicate.

A limited view of what mathematics is.

Concepts of Learning

BEHAVIORAL MATHEMATICS INSTRUCTION

• Algorithms.

• Repetitive but separate similar stimuli.

• Efficient for skill development - although research suggest that it is short lived.

• Teacher is worker. Students passive.

Cognitive

• Focus on Problem Solving.

• Multiple Representations.

• Dependent upon children’s stages of development.

• Student active learners.

Timeline• 1920-1930 Behavioral.

• 1930-1944 Cognitive.

• 1945- 1957 Behavioral.

• 1957 - 1973 Cognitive - “New Math.”• 1973- 1985 Behavioral “Back to Basics.”• 1990 - 2000 Reform Movement.

• 2001-2008 NCLB

• 2010 – present Common Core Curriculum and Race to the Top