Standards
Applications of Learning
Through Applications of Learning, students demonstrate and deepen their understanding of basic knowledge and skills. These applied learning skills cross academic disciplines and reinforce the important learning of the disciplines. The ability to use these skills will greatly influence students' success in school, in the workplace and in the community.
Communicating
Express and interpret information and ideas.
Everyone must be able to read and write technical material to be competitive in the modern workplace. Mathematics provides students with opportunities to grow in the ability to read, write and talk about situations involving numbers, variables, equations, figures and graphs. The ability to shift between verbal, graphical, numerical and symbolic modes of representing a problem helps people formulate, understand, solve and communicate technical information. Students must have opportunities in mathematics classes to confront problems requiring them to translate between representations, both within mathematics and between mathematics and other areas; to communicate findings both orally and in writing; and to develop displays illustrating the relationships they have observed or constructed.
Working on Teams
Learn and contribute productively as individuals and as members of groups.
The use of mathematics outside the classroom requires sharing expertise as well as applying individual knowledge and skills. Working in teams allows students to share ideas, to develop and coordinate group approaches to problems, and to share and learn from each other in communicating findings. Students must have opportunities to develop the skills and processes provided by team problem-solving experiences to be prepared to function as members of society and productive participants in the workforce.
Making Connections
Recognize and apply connections of important information and ideas within and among learning areas.
Mathematics is used extensively in business; the life, natural and physical sciences; the social sciences; and in the fine arts. Medicine, architecture, engineering, the industrial arts and a multitude of occupations are also dependent on mathematics. Mathematics offers necessary tools and ways of thinking to unite the concepts, relationships and procedures common to these areas. Mathematics provides a language for expressing ideas across disciplines, while, at the same time, providing connections linking number and operation, measurement, geometry, data and algebra within mathematics itself. Students must have experiences which require them to make such connections among mathematics and other disciplines. They will then see the power and utility that mathematics brings to expressing, understanding and solving problems in diverse settings beyond the classroom.