Analyzing Middle School Mathematics Curricula: A Comparative Study Using Three Measurement Tools
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Associated Project
Middle School Math: Culturally Responsive Materials, Teacher Professional Learning, and Student Engagement
Prepared for:
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
Key Findings
- Illustrative Math, Into Math, and Eureka Math meet expectations for alignment with the CCSS grade-level and mathematical practice expectations but differ in their usability.
- All six curricula place greater emphasis than the Common Core State Standards recommend on procedural practice, resulting in less emphasis than recommended on more cognitively demanding tasks.
- All six curricula offer limited explicit guidance in enacting CRMT practices.
- Illustrative Math is almost always the highest-rated curriculum, across each tool and its domains.
This report seeks to understand how six middle school mathematics curricula vary along dimensions of high quality. Given a particular focus on understanding the mathematics classroom experiences of students who are Black, Latino, multilingual learners, and/or experiencing poverty, along with recent attention directed to the importance of culturally responsive mathematics teaching (CRMT), we pay particular attention to how curricula provide guidance to enact CRMT practices.
We use three tools to assess the quality of the curricula: EdReports, the Surveys of Enacted Curricula, and a Culturally Responsive Mathematics Teaching curriculum coding tool, which we developed for this purpose.
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