This workshop will explore the fundamental problems of trying to assess students' mathematical proficiency, seeking to take a more comprehensive perspective on what it is to learn, know, and use mathematics. The advent of the Common Core State Standards both increases the demand and broadens the conception of what it is to be mathematically skillful, and opens new opportunities and challenges to improving our ability to assess what students understand and can do.

The wide adoption of the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics (CCSSM) offers a helpful curricular coherence to the environment of teacher education. And so the CCSSM present both an opportunity and a challenge to teacher education. An opportunity because of the greater focus made possible. A challenge because not only of the ambitious level of the CCSSM, but also of the prominent role in them of Mathematical Practices. While most mathematicians will find these congenial, much needs to be done to make them meaningfully understood by teachers and teacher educators, and, still more, how to enact them as an organic aspect of instruction. The CIME workshop aims to gather and stimulate ideas for how to meet this opportunity and challenge.

This workshop will showcase materials and successful teacher education programs, examine the Common Core State Standards and its implications, and explore how mathematics education research can improve practice.

The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics has just released a new document, Focus in High School Mathematics: Reasoning and Sense-Making. The Council of Chief State School Officers and the National Governor’s Association have initiated a state led effort to produce Common Core State Standards, which they hope will move states toward national curricular coherence. The national scene is being transformed through stimulus money aimed at having states adopt common standards. This is a significant time for mathematicians to weigh in for coherence and a focus on thinking, understanding and sense-making. For this reason MSRI will host the seventh Critical Issues in Mathematics Education Workshop on this topic. Themes of the workshop will include international comparisons, the role of a coherent national curriculum in the teaching of mathematics, and the ways in which technology can be used to support reasoning and sense-making.

Teaching Undergraduates Mathematics will be the sixth in a series of Critical Issues in Education workshops hosted by the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (MSRI) in Berkeley, CA. Whereas previous workshops focused on K-12 education and teacher education, this workshop will focus on undergraduate education.

For over two decades, the teaching and learning of algebra has been a focus of mathematics education at the precollege level. This workshop will examine issues in algebra education at two critical points in the continuum from elementary school to undergraduate studies: at the transitions from arithmetic to algebra and from high school to university. In addition, the workshop will involve participants in discussions about various ways to structure an algebra curriculum across the entire K-12 curriculum.

Building on the issues investigated in these previous workshops, this workshop will focus concretely on courses, programs and materials that aim to increase teachers’ mathematical knowledge for teaching. Both courses and programs that lead to initial certification and professional development of current teachers will be examined at the workshop. In addition, the workshop will examine efforts by colleges, universities, school districts, professional organizations and funding agencies to support people who teach these courses or lead these workshops.