Standards for Mathematics

Our original requirements for standards (for website classification):

• Freely available.
• Be consistent, well organized and challenging.
• Be complete through Calculus 1, i.e. entry level university mathematics.
  
• Reflect the standards of countries with the highest results on the international mathematics studies: TIMSS and PISA .
• Be mathematically rigorous and assume that with proper educational techniques all pupils can learn a certain level of mathematics and most pupils can learn advanced mathematics.
• Contain detailed information for teachers as well as pupils/students about the level of the topic to be presented, e.g. “in grade 6, when introducing the idea of percents, use only percents of 5%, 10%, …”  This is typically called a “curriculum framework”.
  
• Contain detailed information about emphasis, i.e. what learning must take place in order for the pupil/student to successfully progress to the next level in mathematics.
• Encourage the development of both manipulative skills and thinking skills.

 The team from TFB studied many mathematics standards available on the Internet as well as comments and criticisms of these standards by experts throughout the world.

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The California State Standards

• In addition to being excellent and fulfilling the above requirements completely, we were stunned and pleased by the amount of additional information freely available on-line for and about the California State standards.
  
• The teams from TFB and SUTE carefully reviewed not only the Standards themselves, but also the curriculum framework and many sets of sample and actual problems and solutions. They decided that the Standards and Framework would be the classification system at this website and to translate them into Macedonian and Albanian.
  
• References:

  [CaS1]     California State Mathematics Standards (1999) http://www.cde.ca.gov/be/st/ss/mthmain.asp

  [CaS2] California State Mathematics Standards – Curriculum Framework http://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/ma/cf/index.asp
  

  “The State of the State Standards” [SOS] graded the math standards of the 50 USA states according to a rigorous set of criteria. Only three states received an A. California State Standards received the highest score and a grade of A.
  
  [The California State Math] standards express what every student in California can and needs to learn in mathematics. They are comparable to the standards of other countries, including Japan and Singapore, two high-performing countries on the Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS). [CaCa]  

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