What is EMPower?
Professional Development Opportunities
Developed and field tested by the Educational Research Collaborative at TERC with support from the National Science Foundation (grant ESI 9911410).
Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.
What is EMPower?
Extending Mathematical Power (EMPower) integrates recent mathematics education
reform into the field of education for adults and out-of-school youth. EMPower
was designed especially for those students who return for a second chance at
education by enrolling in remedial and adult basic education programs, high
school equivalency programs, and developmental programs at community colleges.
However, the curriculum is appropriate for a variety of other settings as well,
such as high schools, workplaces, and parent and paraprofessional education
programs. EMPower builds interest and competency in mathematical problem solving
and communication.
Over the course of four years (2000–2004), a collaboration of teachers and
researchers with expertise in adult numeracy education and K–12 mathematics
reform developed and piloted eight contextualized curriculum units. These units
are organized around four central topics: number and operation sense; patterns,
functions, and relations; geometry and measurement; and data and graphs. The
EMPower program serves as a model for a cohesive mathematics curriculum that
offers content consistent with the Principles and Standards for School Mathematics
(NCTM, 2000), as well as frameworks that are adult-focused, such as the Equipped
for the Future Content Standards (Stein, 2000), the Massachusetts ABE Curriculum
Frameworks for Mathematics and Numeracy (Massachusetts Department of Education,
2001), and the Adult Numeracy Network’s Framework for Adult Numeracy Standards
(Curry, Schmitt, & Waldron, 1995). The curriculum fosters a pedagogy of
learning for understanding; it embeds teacher support and is transformative,
yet realistic, for multilevel classrooms.
EMPower challenges students and teachers to consistently extend their ideas of what it means to do math. The curriculum focuses on mathematical reasoning, communication, and problem solving with a variety of approaches and strategies, not just rote memorization and symbol manipulation. The program fosters a learning community in which students are encouraged to expand their understanding of mathematics through open-ended investigations, working collaboratively, sharing ideas, and discovering multiple ways for solving problems. The goal of EMPower is to help people build experience managing the mathematical demands of various life situations, such as finances and commerce, interpretation of news stories, and leisure activities, and to connect those experiences to mathematical principles.
EMPower emphasizes:
- Data analysis, geometry and measurement, algebra, and number and operations at all student levels.
- Reliance on benchmark numbers—such as powers and multiples of 10, common fractions, and their decimal and percent equivalents—for making mental calculations.
- Early use of calculators to support computation.
- Development of reasoning on proportion and parts of quantities before consideration of formal operations with rational numbers.
- Making decisions about data where students generate, as well as interpret, graphical representations.
- Geometry and measurement based on opportunities to see and touch in developing an understanding of spatial relationships and formulas.
- Leading with patterns and relationships in contextual situations and the representations of these situations with diagrams, tables, graphs, verbal rules, and symbolic notation to develop algebraic competence.
A Focus on Pedagogy
Mathematics is meaningful within a social context. While mathematical truths are universal, the meaning and relevance of numbers changes according to the setting and culture. Therefore, the EMPower pedagogy is focused on sets of connected activities that require communication and discourse.
EMPower asks students to
- Work collaboratively with others on open-ended investigations;
- Share strategies orally and in writing; and
- Justify answers in multiple ways.
Key features of curriculum activities provide
- Clear mathematical goals
- Contexts that are engaging and useful for young people and adults
- Opportunities to strengthen mathematical language and communication skills
- Various ways of entering and solving problems
- Puzzles that draw students into problems and motivate them to seek a solution.