Rethinking the First Two Years of High School Mathematics with the UCSMP

The University of Chicago School Mathematics Project (UCSMP) was begun in 1983 as an attempt to implement the recommendations of many reports to improve school mathematics. The national reports available at the time (e.g., NACOME [1975); NCTM [1980]; CBMS [19821; College Board [19831; NCEE [1983)) called for a curriculum of broader scope that would include statistics, probability, and discrete mathematics and that would give strong attention to applications, use the latest in technology, and emphasize problem solving. To accomplish the curricular revolution recommended by these reports, it was essential that new, appropriate materials be written. History had shown that neither materials written for the best students, such as those from the new-math era, nor materials written for the slower students, such as those popular in the backto-basics movement, were appropriate for the vast majority of students without major revisions (Usiskin 1985). Thus UCSMP started with the goal of developing mathematics for all grades K–12 that would be appropriate for the majority of students in the middle.