Research Notes

By Continued

High school students who followed an innovative mathematics curriculum that emphasizes real-world problem-solving got better grades than their peers not only in math, but in all their subjects, a study has found.

The Interactive Mathematics Program, developed by educators in California, integrates four years of courses that usually are kept separate: algebra, geometry, trigonometry, and pre-calculus. Students also learn concepts from probability and statistics.

To evaluate the curriculum, researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison studied transcripts of more than 1,000 students who graduated in 1993 from three California high schools that have used the program since 1989. They examined the number and types of math courses the students took, their standardized-test scores, and the grade-point averages of both students who had taken the curriculum and...