Complete Coverage

Market for S. Korean Math Texts Remains Elusive for U.S. Educator

Japanese, Singaporean materials already in use

Fourteen years ago, an American professor traveled to South Korea on sabbatical and came away so impressed with that country’s math textbooks and teaching materials that she decided to have an entire set of them mailed back to the United States.

Since then, Janice Grow-Maienza’s relatively modest investment—she paid $72 in shipping costs—has become a personal, multiyear quest to get Korean lessons into American classrooms.

So far, those efforts have not borne fruit. While math texts and lessons from two similarly high-performing Asian countries, Singapore and Japan, have found a niche in American schools, Korean mathematics remains largely absent from U.S. classrooms, despite the interest of researchers like Ms. Grow-Maienza, a professor of education at Truman State University, in Kirksville, Mo., and those otherwise...