Characteristics of Research-Based Math Curriculum Reform

The teacher acts as facilitator of learning instead of imparter of information, asking questions, probing student understanding, and encouraging active learning.
Mathematical work is meaningful to students and has a purpose. Students play an active role in deciding what to do and how to do it.
Students explore a broad range of real-life problems and make real world applications appropriate to their level of development.
Students do whole or complete work instead of discrete exercises.
Students are introduced to computational procedures as they need them.
Students reflect on their work orally and in writing, asking themselves why and how questions.
Students work together in solving problems and evaluating their individual and collective work.
Assessment is integrated in instruction and focuses on what students understand and can do instead of what they do not know or cannot do.
Students and teachers share common understanding of interpretive standards for evaluating work that includes consideration of the quality of students' understanding of task, their approaches to problems and the procedures used for solving them, their reasoning about why choices were made, the connections they make across ideas and tasks, and their communication of ideas through mathematical terms and forms of representation.

The teacher acts as facilitator of learning instead of imparter of information, asking questions, probing student understanding, and encouraging active learning.