Algebra for Elementary School Teachers
Professor Kelly McCormick
This enhancement focused on foregrounding the connection between course content and the Common Core State Standards and Practices. Opportunities were provided for students in the course to unpack and make sense of the mathematics in the CCSS.
This enhancement explicitly integrated the CCSS into a content course for elementary school teachers. At the beginning of the course, few students had heard of the CCSS and in a pre-assessment, most were unfamiliar with the language and mathematics in the Operations and Algebraic Thinking domain. On a daily basis, the students worked to make sense and unpack the mathematics in the CCSS. The students were given the following question on a pre- and post-course assessment,
“On a scale of 1 to 10, how knowledgeable are you with the Common Core State Standards (one being you have never heard of them before this class and ten being you feel extremely knowledgeable of the content and have a deep understanding of it.)”
At the beginning of the class, all of students’ responses were between 1 and 4; by the end of the class, the responses ranged from 7 to 10. The students were also able to correctly answer all of the math questions that were based on unpacking the CCSS on the post assessment.