COMMENTARY: 1980s: An Agenda in Action, A Decade of Change

In 1980 the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) published a document entitled An Agenda for Action. The eight recommendations in that document became one of the most significant collections of ideas for mathematics instruction of the decade, and have since shaped both research directions and thinking about mathematics instruction specifically and mathematics education generally. The agenda was widely adopted across North America, and the recommendations wound themselves inextricably into mathematics classrooms and academia alike.

The eight recommendations can be found on the NCTM website (nctm. org). Since 1980 they have been further developed in the NCTM journals and the 1983 NCTM yearbook, The Agenda in Action. At the close of the decade, the NCTM publication Curriculum and Evaluation Standards for School Mathematics (1989) defined new standards for mathematics instruction. The original eight recommendations (copied from www.nctm.org/standards) are that