Students' Construction of Formulas in Context

The Mathematics in Contrat (MiC) project is an NSF-funded project carried out by the University of Wisconsin—Madison and the Freudenthal institute of Utrecht University in the Netherlands. The purpose of the MiC project is to create a comprehensive mathematics curriculum for grades 5 through 8 that reflects the content and pedagogy suggested by the NCTM's Curriculum amd Evaluation Standards for School Mathematics (1989). The materials being developed are based on the beliefs that mathematics should make sense to students and that mathematics is used to make sense of the world around us. The philosophy is based on the theory of Realistic Mathematics Education (RME), as developed at the Freudenthal Institute in the past decades, and on the belief that mathematics is fallible, changing, and, like any other body of knowledge, the product of human inventiveness. In the MiC project, the content is organized into four combined strands—number, algebra, geometry, and statistics and probability. Over forty instructionl units spread out over the four strands have been developed.