Communicating Mathematics

Affording more opportunities to engage students in thinking and communicating mathematically and integrating technology into mathematics education are clear trends in curricular reform. Recent recommendations emphasize adopting a more active, process-oriented approach to mathematics learning and teaching. The Mathematical Sciences Education Board's document Reshaping School Mathematics (1990) emphasizes that a person engaged in mathematics gathers, discovers, creates, and expresses facts and ideas about patterns. The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics in its Curriculum and Evaluation Standards for School Mathematics (1989) advocates mathematics teaching through activities that encourage students to explore mathematics, to gather evidence and make conjectures, and to reason and communicate mathematically as they discuss and write about ideas that use the language of mathematics. This vision of the classroom specifies a mathematics curriculum in which students are “doing and investigating” mathematics rather than just “knowing” mathematics.