By the time this editorial is in print, a draft of the Principles and Standards for School Mathematics will be available for reading and comments. This seems to be a good time to provide some background on this initiative and to urge you to read the draft document and provide comments to NCTM’s Commission on the Future of the Standards.

Drawing on several decades of research findings, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) produced, between 1989 and 1995, three volumes of Standards in which members of the mathematics education community formulated new visions of mathematics learning, teaching, and assessment.

We define spatial structuring as the mental operation of constructing an organization or form for an object or set of objects. It is an essential mental process underlying students' quantitative dealings with spatial situations. In this article, we examine in detail students' structuring and enumeration of 2-dimensional (2D) rectangular arrays of squares. Our research indicates that many students do not "see" the row-by-column structure we assume in such arrays. We describe the various levels of sophistication in students' structuring of these arrays and elaborate the nature of the mental process of structuring.  

In this article, using reform recommendations that call for parental involvement as a springboard, I provide an analysis of the positioning of parents in the school mathematics reform literature. Employing Foucault's (1980) conception of "regimes of truth," I demonstrate how the literature has created the accepted discourse for mathematics education reform. I then argue that the professionalization of teachers has distanced parents from schools and led to conflict between parents and mathematics educators and that to reconcile this conflict, ways in which parents can be included in mathematics education must be considered. It is essential first, however, to understand issues central to involving parents in mathematics education. A research agenda for parental involvement in mathematics education is presented.

Review Complexity and Insight Theory of Didactical Situations in Mathematics (Didactique des Mathmatiques, 1970-1990-Guy Brousseau). (1997). Nicolas Balacheff, Martin Cooper, Rosamund Sutherland, and Virginia Warfield (Eds. and Trans.), Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers. xix + 304 pp. ISBN 0-7923-4