The Investigations curriculum represents the culmination of over 20 years of research and development aimed at improving the teaching and learning of elementary mathematics.
Funded by the National Science Foundation1 , TERC, and Pearson, Investigations in Number, Data, and Space is based on:
- Our goals and
guiding principles about
teaching and learning mathematics
(see below)
- What has been learned
from developing and supporting
the implementation of the
curriculum over the course
of 18 years
- Collaboration with
over 100 classroom teachers
from a variety of settings
in field testing the curriculum;
this field testing involved
documentation of thousands
of hours in classrooms,
observations of students,
input from teachers, and
analysis of student work
- An extensive body of research on how children learn mathematics.
Six major goals guided the development of Investigations. The curriculum is designed to:
- Support students
to make sense of mathematics
and learn that they can
be mathematical thinkers
- Focus on computational
fluency with whole numbers
as a major goal of the
elementary grades
- Provide substantive
work in important areas
of mathematics—rational
numbers, geometry, measurement,
data, and early algebra—and
connections among them
- Emphasize reasoning
about mathematical ideas
- Communicate mathematics
content and pedagogy to
teachers
- Engage the range of learners in understanding mathematics.
Underlying these goals are three guiding principles that are our touchstones as we approach both students and teachers as agents of their own learning:
- 1. Students have mathematical
ideas. The curriculum must
support all students in
developing and expanding
those ideas.
- 2. Teachers are engaged
in ongoing learning about
mathematics content and
about how students learn
mathematics. The curriculum
must support teachers in
this learning.
- 3. Teachers collaborate with the students and curriculum materials to create the curriculum as enacted in the classroom. The curriculum must support teachers in implementing the curriculum in a way that accommodates the needs of their particular students.
Based on extensive classroom testing, Investigations takes seriously the time students need to develop a strong conceptual foundation and skills based on that foundation. Therefore, each curriculum unit focuses on an area of content, in depth, providing 2 to 5 1⁄2 weeks for students to develop and practice ideas across a variety of activities and contexts that build on each other. The units also address the learning needs of real students in a wide range of classrooms and communities. The investigations are carefully designed to invite all students into mathematics—girls and boys; members of diverse cultural, ethnic, and language groups; and students with a wide variety of strengths, needs, and interests.
1Investigations was developed with support from the National Science Foundation under Grant No. ESI-0095450. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.