According to Wikipedia:
New Mathematics is the name is commonly given to a set of teaching practices introduced in the U.S. shortly after the Sputnik crisis in order to boost science education and mathematical skill in the population so that the perceived intellectual threat of Soviet engineers, reputedly highly skilled mathematicians, could be met.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Math
UMM was the product of the Secondary School Mathematics Curriculum Improvement Study. The central idea of the program was to organize mathematics not by algebra, geometry, etc., but rather to unify those branches by studying the fundamental concepts of sets, relations, operations, and mappings, and fundamental structures such as groups, rings, fields, and vector spaces.
Some 25,000 students took SSMCIS courses nationwide during the late 1960s and early 1970s.
One SSMCIS student, Toomas Hendrik Ilves of Leonia High School, decades later became Foreign Minister and then President of Estonia. He credited the SSMCIS course, the early exposure it gave him to computer programming, and the teacher of the course, Christine Cummings, with his subsequent interest in computer infrastructure, which in part resulted in the country leaping over its Soviet-era technological backwardness, computer-accessible education becoming pervasive in Estonian schools, and the Internet in Estonia gaining one of the highest penetration rates in the world.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secondary_ ... ment_Study
There is very little info about UMM published on the internet. Does this indicate that it was an obscure and unsuccessful experiment where most of the 25,000 or so students who took the course would rather forget about it? One former student of UMM has reported that they found the course favorable for them.
http://freakonomics.com/2012/05/21/the- ... cher-ever/
27 Dec 2014, 11:06 pm
