Numerous research studies over the past five years indicate that a high percentage of college students have severe deficiencies in their ability to use mathematics as a language for representing simple quantitative relationships. In the United States these problems are nearly as common among students with strong computational skills in algebra and…

Five classroom situations in Japanese elementary schools are described and interpreted from perspective of first four standards in the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) Curriculum and Evaluation Standards. Concludes that Japanese children do so well in mathematics because Japanese teachers embody essence of the standards in…