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Adaptive Curriculum Math
By Julie Leckman
T he new Common Core State Standards in math emphasize depth over breadth in an effort
to help students move from simple
memorization to deep, meaningful
learning. Even though there is a glut
of educational programs and software
available today, few provide the content and resources needed to help students master the more difficult math
concepts. Adaptive Curriculum Math
(AC Math) scores highly as a tool to
help teachers turn surface learners
into deep conceptual learners.
Strong and Accurate Content
My first exposure to AC Math was in
a session presented by former ISTE
President Helen Padgett at an Arizona
Technology in Education Association
conference in Flagstaff, Arizona, USA.
Mathematics specialists from Arizona
State University designed the lessons
and activity objects (interactive lessons) in this program.
Not only is their content accurate,
but the designers are acutely aware of
how to structure a lesson to engage
students. The lessons approach new
content at the students’ intuitive level
of understanding, yet designers have
structured them to contain focused
exploration and problem solving so
that students achieve a high level of
understanding. The learning activities answer student questions such as
“Why do we have to learn this?” by
anchoring learning in real-life problems and interactive manipulatives.
AC Math allows students to relate the context of graphic representations and formal mathematics to real-life events.
Students engage in practical use, but
not at the expense of conventional
mathematics structures and language.
Alignments
AC Math takes the guesswork out
of which lessons apply to what the
teacher may be teaching. Creators
aligned and catalogued all the activity objects to the Common Core
State Standards and individual state
standards. What’s more, every interactive lesson embeds mathematical
practice standards. An added benefit
for teachers is that lessons align to
some of the more commonly used
mathematics texts, providing a
strong supplement to textbook
activities.
Engagement
AC Math engages my students with
compelling animations, graphics,
interactive simulations, and content
presented through clever dialogues
and real-life scenarios. For example,
students act as detectives and use
mathematical combinations to determine all the possible disguises of the
criminal “Manny Many Faces.” In
another activity, students construct
linear functions from costs before and
after discounts at a pizzeria. Students
also engage in simulations, such as using a juice machine with a cylindrical
collection container and cone-shaped
juice glasses to derive the relationship
and formula for the volume of a cone.
This active learning approach really
