[3] These standards highlighted four core features of the curriculum:[4][5] These principles have guided the development and refinement of the Connected Mathematics program for over twenty years.
Applications/Connections/Extensions problem sets are included for each investigation to help students practice, apply, connect, and extend essential understandings.
By funding state and urban systemic initiatives, local systemic change projects, and math-science partnership programs, as well as national centers for standards-based school mathematics curriculum dissemination and implementation, the NSF provided powerful support for the adoption and implementation of the various reform mathematics curricula developed during the standards era.
Connected Mathematics has become the most widely used of the middle school curriculum materials developed to implement the NCTM Standards.
[8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20] In the large-scale controlled research studies the most common (but by no means universal) pattern of results has been better performance by CMP students on measures of conceptual understanding and problem solving and no significant difference between students of CMP and traditional curriculum materials on measures of routine skills and factual knowledge.
Critics made the following claims: [citation needed] The publishers and creators of CMP have stated that reassuring results from a variety of research projects blunted concerns about basic skill mastery, missing knowledge, and student misconceptions resulting from use of CMP and other reform curricula.