Curriculum

While mammography and pap smears have demonstrated great success in identifying cancer in earlier, more treatable stages, these effective screening tools remain underused today. Too many women still die from breast and cervical cancer that could have been treated early as a result of timely detection.

Community service programs—when combined with curriculum—not only promote community values and good citizenship, they may also protect students from risky health behaviors during adolescence. When New York City middle school students’ community service work (three hours per week) was combined with health instruction, both their violent behavior and their high-risk sexual activity dropped significantly.

According to researchers in EDC’s Center for Mathematics Education, traditional mathematics curricula have neglected visual mathematics in favor of verbal and logical approaches that may not work as well for many students.

One spring day in 1975, as the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Lexington approached, Carol Pixton’s eighth grade history class decided to write a play about the battle. For inspiration, they turned to their innovative history curriculum, From Subject to Citizen, an EDC series that emphasized primary historical materials and experiential learning.

EDC has developed a series of discipline-specific guides that introduce and review a variety of standards-based curricula.

As the fourth largest state in the union, Montana extends to regions so sparsely populated students attend one-room schools staffed by teachers whose nearest colleague might be a hundred miles away. While news of education reforms may reach these rural teachers, opportunities to examine and discuss them with peers are rare. EDC’s Center for Science Education (CSE) wants to change that.

Once taught primarily to college-bound students, algebra is now recognized as a critical “gateway” course for all students. “It’s considered the entrée into higher math, the hard sciences, even into university study itself,” explains Peter Braunfeld, professor emeritus of mathematics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “It’s become the difference between getting in and being left out.”

One of the first principles of universal design is that it is better to build flexible options into a curriculum at the outset rather than trying to retrofit the program after it is published. A corollary might be that even when you’ve built in flexibility, you never stop retrofitting to meet the needs of an ever-expanding universe of users.

Elegance. Culture. Habits of mind. Such phrases are usually reserved for literature, philosophy, or fine arts. But in the case of EDC’s newest curriculum, they describe geometry. While covering the basics of high school geometry, Connected Geometry discusses ways to build elegant bridges among mathematical ideas, create a lively culture of mathematical investigation, and develop students’ abilities to inquire and think.

The staff of EDC’s K-12 Mathematics Curriculum Center at EDC likes to think of their new book, Choosing a Standards-Based Mathematics Curriculum, as the “eyes, yardsticks, and noses” schools will use to evaluate and select a mathematics program that fits their needs.