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Illustrative Mathematics (IM) Design Principles
Illustrative Mathematics (IM) Design Principles

How the IM materials focus on building students' mathematical understanding and skills through a variety of activities and representations.

Jimena Pineda avatar
Written by Jimena Pineda
Updated over a week ago

The design principles of the Illustrative Mathematics (IM) materials focus on developing conceptual understanding and procedural fluency. This is done by starting each unit with a pre-assessment to gauge students' prior knowledge, then introducing new concepts and representations in a way that builds on what students already know. Students have opportunities to make connections to real-world contexts throughout the materials, and activities are structured using the Five Practices for Orchestrating Productive Mathematical Discussions.

Here are the specific task purposes in the IM materials:

  • Provide experience with a new context.

  • Introduce a new concept and associated language.

  • Introduce a new representation.

  • Formalize a definition of a term for an idea previously encountered informally.

  • Identify and resolve common mistakes and misconceptions that people make.

  • Practice using mathematical language.

  • Work toward mastery of a concept or procedure.

  • Provide an opportunity to apply mathematics to a modeling or other application problem.

The IM materials also include a note about standards alignments, which indicates how each activity aligns to a specific grade-level standard. Additionally, the materials include a note about mathematical diagrams, which emphasizes that only components with mathematical meaning should be included in diagrams.

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