Linking Curricular Changes to Achievement

December 6, 2010

Modifications to a curriculum affect student achievement. To determine exactly how, Mitchell Nathan and Martha Alibali are working with colleagues at WestEd's National Center for Cognition and Mathematics Instruction to redesign a middle school mathematics curriculum, the Connected Mathematics Project. Nathan and Alibali focus on the impact of students' mathematical thinking when materials and instruction link different representations of mathematical information (for example, graphic and verbal descriptions). Nathan and Alibali will also develop materials, analyze data, and prepare results (a) for the experiments that focus on effects of redesigned curriculum units across grade levels, and (b) for a large-scale, school-level random assignment efficacy study.