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The Mathematics Education Program provides learning experiences for all students to enable them to meet the 14 Mathematics Content Standards of the Hawaii Content and Performance Standards. The Mathematics Content Standards are clear, broad statements that identify what all students should know about mathematics and be able to do using mathematics in order to make sense of the world around them.
 
The 14 Mathematics Content Standards are organized in five content strands: Number and Operations; Measurement; Geometry and Spatial Sense; Patterns, Functions and Algebra; and Data Analysis, Statistics, and Probability. Each of the Mathematics Content Standards is further benchmarked by grade level for grades K-8, and by course for high school. The benchmarks indicate what is developmentally appropriate content knowledge and skills for which students must demonstrate proficiency by the end of each grade level or course Instructional experiences should be designed to help students meet these Mathematics Standards and should provide students with opportunities to engage in learning that supports their movement toward mathematical proficiency. There are five interwoven and interdependent components that define mathematical proficiency:
  1. Conceptual understanding: Comprehending mathematical concepts, operations, and relations knowing what mathematical symbols, diagrams, and procedures mean.
  2. Procedural fluency: Carrying out mathematical procedures (such as adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing numbers) flexibly, accurately, efficiently, and appropriately.
  3. Strategic competence: Being able to formulate problems mathematically and to devise strategies for representing and solving them using concepts and procedures appropriately.
  4. Adaptive reasoning: Having the capacity for logical thought, reflection, explanation, and justification; using logic to explain and justify a solution to a problem or to extend from something known to something not yet known.
  5. Productive disposition: Seeing mathematics as sensible, useful, doable, and worthwhile, coupled with a belief in diligence and one’s own efficacy.
At the same time the five components of mathematical proficiency are addressed, students will be simultaneously engaging in the mathematics process standards of Communication, Connections, Problem Solving, Reasoning and Proof, and Representation, as well as the General Learner Outcomes. Together, the process standards, General Learner Outcomes, and the components of mathematical proficiency are characteristics of standards-based mathematics education, and therefore, should be integrated into the curriculum and instruction for all courses.
 
Mathematics is required in grades K to 8 with an additional three years of mathematics in high school to meet current graduation requirements. The elementary program consists of daily instructional experiences that ensure that all students have opportunities to meet all of the benchmarks of all content standards of each grade level. The secondary program consists of primarily semester courses that are organized in various course path sequences.