Common Core Math: Domains and Standards Explained

Video Transcription

Hello, ladies and gentlemen. I hope you're having a great day today. Today, we're going to focus in on the common core math standards, and specifically explaining those domains and standards that are a part of common core math. For today's lesson, I've chosen a quote by Rene Descartes, which states, "but in my opinion, all things in nature occur mathematically." By the end of today's lesson, you are going to be able to analyze the structure of common core math standards, the domains, and the practice standards that are involved.

First, let's take a look and break down the different parts of the standards. First, we have the content standards. What these do is these help to define for teachers what students should understand and be able to do. We then break down the common core math standards into what are called clusters.

These clusters summarize groups of related standards. They look at major, minor, and supporting standards. Some clusters tend to be given more attention over others based on the complexity or the time it takes to master, or the connection to topics covered in later grades, or to college and career readiness, and although they are not all critical, all standards should be addressed to help avoid those knowledge gaps that students can sometimes fall into in their understanding of the material.

Finally, let's focus in on the domains. Domains are larger groups of related standards. It's important to note that standards from different domains may sometimes be closely related, so you could see something that looks a little bit like an overlap here.

Let's focus in and really explain those domains. First, we can look at those high school in conceptual categories. You'll notice here, these are the major groups of related standards that high school students are going to focus in on. You'll notice that some of them look very similar to actual class names of high school math classes. When we get into the K-8 domains, we're looking at a larger group since we're looking at eight grades, technically, nine if you consider kindergarten, as opposed to just four, and a lot more different base information that these students are going to need to hone in on.

Finally, let's take a look at the eight math practice standards. These are the major standards developed by the Common Core Standards Initiative finalized in 2012. The first is to make sense of problems and persevere in solving them. These are the standards put in place when we are practicing math. We should be able to reason abstractly and quantitatively when looking at math, to construct viable arguments and critique the reasoning of others for why we've solved something the way we have, model with mathematics, use appropriate tools strategically, attend to precision, really making sure we're getting in at the nitty gritty of each element, looking for and making use of structure within mathematics, and finally, looking for and expressing regularity in repeated reasoning, really tying together all of those math elements that are being learned.

Now that we've reached the end of the lesson, you should be able to analyze the structure of the common core math standards, the domains, and the practice standards. Now, I want to take a little time for reflection. As you look back on all that we've learned here in this unit, I'm wondering, what do you think will be the most difficult part of getting students to really adopt those eight math practice standards that we discussed? Now, to dive a little deeper and learn how to apply this information, be sure that you check out the Additional Resources section associated with this video. This is where you'll find the links targeted toward helping you discover more ways to apply this course material.