The Center for Curriculum Redesign (CCR) has partnered with the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) to design a world-class mathematics curriculum for K-12 schools that explicitly addresses the learning needs of students for life and work in the 21st century.
CCR is leading math experts and practitioners from Australia, the U.S., and around the world to develop an exemplar world-class mathematics curriculum that any country could use to inform their own curriculum design. This is particularly timely as the OECD has embarked on deepening its Mathematics PISA 2021 assessment.
“This is a world first,” said Charles Fadel, founder of CCR. “We are taking the Australian Curriculum in Mathematics as a starting point because our international analysis shows it is already one of the best curricula worldwide. And we are now applying learnings from recent innovations in curriculum design and professional practice to ensure we modernize the content of mathematics, while also bringing in concepts, interdisciplinary learning and competencies (skills, character, meta-learning).”
“ACARA is pleased to be working with the CCR on this ground-breaking project,” said Robert Randall, CEO of ACARA. “We have a mandate to assemble evidence for reviewing, designing, and refining the Australian Curriculum. This joint project with the CCR will be used to inform any future refinement of the existing Australian Curriculum in Mathematics and to help guide improvements to ACARA’s overall curriculum design and development process.”
Andreas Schleicher, director of the OECD’s Education and Skills directorate, stated, “PISA 2021 will incorporate several new features: more focus on essential and relevant subjects and topics such as exponentials, emphasis on modern branches such as statistics/probabilities, and explicit attention to 21st-century competencies such as reasoning, computational thinking, and resilience. I commend the CCR, our partner in Mathematics for the past 5 years, for leading this endeavor with a world-leading authority such as ACARA”.
The project draws on evidence collected and agreed on as part of the PISA Mathematics 2021 project, which CCR advised, including conferences in 2013 in Stockholm and in 2018 in Geneva. “It is now internationally recognized that the school curriculum needs to allow more time for deeper learning of discipline-specific content and 21st century competencies. In order to do that we need to selectively curate (add, emphasize, de-emphasize, or remove) curriculum content so that the core concepts and essential content are focused on that will best prepare students for life and work in our changing world,” said Charles Fadel.
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