Curriculum Documents Relevant to Newfoundland and Labrador

An ideal K-6 math curriculum would have the property that essentially all students completing that curriculum would have mastered the topics necessary to complete the remainder of the school math curriculum successfully and proceed to the post-secondary program and/or the career of their choice. As many parents and student in Newfoundland and Labrador will tell you, this was not the case for their child and/or that student.

Documents for Download

• A coherent curriculum, Wm Schmidt et al., is available here.
  • "A coherent curriculum" contains work by a research group led by W. Schmidt at the Education Policy Center at Michigan State University. The paper analyses international test data with the purpose of identifying effective math curricula. The result is the A+ curriculum. The analysis also provides some of the answers as to why North American children perform poorly in comparison to students from other countries.

• "A Quality Math Curriculum in Support of Effective Teaching for Elementary Schools" by W. Hook, W. Bishop and J. Hook can be found here.
  • "A Quality Math Curriculum in Support of Effective Teaching for Elementary Schools" describes the immediate positive results achieved by adopting an A+ curriculum in California elementary schools in 1998. It demonstrates that by making a change, the children of Newfoundland and Labrador would reap tremendous benefits.

• The Singapore K-6 curriculum documents from 2007 are available here and page 101 from the NL Grade 4 curriculum guide for comparison.
• Singapore is one of the high performing countries identified by Schmidt's group. Their K-6 curriculum is therefore an example of an A+ curriculum. The document is well written and accessible to all. It states clearly what should be taught when and what should be avoided. I strongly recommend it to readers of this website. Singapore documents here and elsewhere were obtained from the Singapore Ministry of Education website. The page from the NL Grade 4 Guide illustrates the "mile wide inch deep" descriptor. The NL Grade 4 Guide is over 250 pages; The Singapore K-6 Guide is 40.
  The Singapore secondary curriculum documents from 2007 are available here for readers who want to see the continuation.
• "A Critique of the Structure of U.S. Elementary School Mathematics" by Liping Ma can be found here.
  • "This paper contains another example of an A+ curriculum together with a clear explanation of why A+ curricula are so effective. It compares this A+ curriculum with the "strand" type curricula common in the U.S. and Canada and explains why "strand" curricula are ineffective.

• "Why Minimal Guidance During Instruction Does Not Work: An Analysis of the Failure of Constructivist, Discovery, Problem-Based, Experiential, and Inquiry-Based Teaching" by the eminent cognitive scientists, Paul Kirschner, John Sweller and Richard Clark can be found here.

  • The paper explains, based on our current understanding of what it means to learn in terms of brain function, why novice learners need substantial guidance to succeed. Further, it explains why novice learners may know less after being exposed to unguided learning. We strongly recommend that anyone with an interest in K-6 math curricula read this paper.

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