Secondary School Mathematics Curriculum Improvement Study
The program's signature goal was to create a unified treatment of mathematics and eliminate the traditional separate per-year studies of algebra, geometry, trigonometry, and so forth, that was typical of American secondary schools.
The SSMCIS program produced six courses' worth of class material, intended for grades 7 through 12, in textbooks called Unified Modern Mathematics.
[3][5] There were some interactions among these initiatives in the early stages,[6] and the development of SSMCIS was part of a general wave of cooperation in the mathematics education reform movement between Europe and the U.S.[7] "The construction is to be free of any restrictions of traditional content or sequence."
[10][11] The scope and sequence of the curriculum was developed by eighteen mathematicians from the U.S. and Europe in 1966 and subsequently refined in experimental course material by mathematical educators with high school level teaching experience.
[9] By 1971, some thirty-eight contributors to course materials were identified, eight from Teachers College, four from Europe, one from Canada, and the rest from various other universities (and a couple of high schools) in the United States.
[3] Solving traditional applications problems was de-emphasized, especially in the earlier courses, but the intent of the project was to make up for that with its focus on real numbers in measurements, computer programming, and probability and statistics.
[15] Regardless of all these influences and other projects, the SSMCIS study group considered its work unique in scope and breadth, and Fehr wrote that "nowhere [else] had a total 7–12 unified mathematics program been designed, produced, and tested.
[16] Moreover, Fehr believed that the SSMCIS could not just improve students' thinking in mathematics, but in all subjects, by "develop[ing] the capacity of the human mind for the observation, selection, generalization, abstraction, and construction of models for use in the other disciplines.
[4] The pages of the books were formatted by typewriter, augmented by some mathematical symbols and inserted graphs, bound in paper, and published by Teachers College itself.
[11] A more polished hardcover version of Courses I through IV was put out in subsequent years by Addison-Wesley; these were adaptations made by Fehr and others and targeted to students with a broader range of mathematical ability.
Interactive teletype interfaces on slow and erratic dial-up connections, with troublesome paper tape for offline storage, was the typical physical environment.
[9] Eighteen schools in Los Angeles adopted SSMCIS in what was called the Accelerated Mathematics Instruction program; some 2,500 gifted students took part.
[22] By 1974, Fehr stated that 25,000 students were taking SSMCIS courses across the U.S.[4] The Secondary School Mathematics Curriculum Improvement Study program did show some success in its educational purpose.
[17] However, SSMCIS was one of the direct inspirations for the New York State Education Department, in the late 1970s and 1980s, adopting an integrated, three-year mathematics curriculum for all its students, combining algebra, geometry, and trigonometry with an increased emphasis in probability and statistics.
[10] Despite the federal funding source, there was no centralized, national focal point in the U.S. for curriculum changes – such as some European countries had – and that made adoption of SSMCIS innovations a harder task.
[2] Many reform efforts had underestimated the difficulty of getting the public and the mathematics educational community to believe that major changes were really necessary, especially for secondary school programs where college entrance performance was always the key concern of administrators.
[27] 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 became pervasive in Estonian schools, and the Internet in Estonia has one of the highest penetration rates in the world.
