The program is designed to help all students develop a deep understanding of mathematical concepts and how to apply them and prepare them for using their skills in further education and on the job. It challenges students to explore open-ended situations actively, in a way that resembles the inquiry method used by mathematicians and scientists in their work. Students routinely investigate specific cases, look for and articulate patterns, and make, test, and prove conjectures. Students begin to work with algebraic concepts in the third grade. It presents students with coherent, connected, and accessible mathematical experiences.
Students learn to become mathematically proficient and confident problem-solvers.
Each unit of the program includes investigations, problems, and exercises that are interrelated. Materials emphasize the development of skills such as problem solving, communication, reasoning, mathematical connections, estimation, measurement, statistics, probability, fractions and decimals. Students use technology to create and analyze solutions to real-world problems, increase their conceptual understanding of mathematics, and develop competence with standard symbolic notations for mathematical concepts and an ability to organize their mathematical work in a way that communicates their ideas. Number Power is a supplemental program for grades K-6 focused on developing number sense and social interaction skills in cooperative settings. Students engage in cooperative group work as they learn to make sense of numbers and their relationships, explore numbers as quantities, make judgments about the reasonableness of numbers and solutions, and build understanding about the effects of operations on numbers.