The Number and Operations Standard

Historically, number has been a cornerstone of the entire mathematics curriculum.
     — Principles and Standards for School Mathematics, p. 32.

The Principles and Standards for School Mathematics (NCTM, 2000) places Number and Operations as the first among its five content standards for prekindergarten through grade 12. At the middle grades level, the emphasis is on rational numbers — understanding, representing, and calculating them using a range of strategies. The goal is “developing fluency,” which requires “a balance between conceptual understanding and computational fluency” (p. 35).

Numbers at Work! highlights activities that help create balance by involving students in problem scenarios that demand flexible thinking as well as computational skills in working with fractions, decimals, and percents. When students work in contexts that come from the everyday world, it is expected that they relate more genuinely and creatively to numbers and to the operations on them. As stated in the Standards, middle grades students “acquire an appreciation for, and develop understanding of, mathematical ideas if they have frequent encounters with interesting, challenging problems” (p. 211).

You can find the 14 specific expectations for middle school students identified in the Principles at http://standards.nctm.org/document/chapter6/numb.htm. A resource from NCTM that gives examples of teaching this standard at the middle school level is Navigating Through Number and Operations in Grades 6-8.

Reference

National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. (2000). Principles and Standards for School Mathematics. Reston, VA: Author.

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Copyright October 2007 — The Ohio State University. This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0424671. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.