Here is the first public draft of the progressions project, on Number and Operations in Base Ten [corrected version uploaded 26 May 2012]. We welcome any comments or suggested changes, which will be considered for the final draft. Please post comments to this thread. We will be releasing other draft progressions for elementary and middle school over the coming weeks.

[29 July 2012] This thread is now closed. You can now ask questions on this progression here.

In the progressions project we’ve been discussing how best to represent the standards for mathematical practice. The practices are signposted throughout the documents, but we’ve also been thinking about how to provide some structure for the practice standards that will help people avoid fruitless tagging exercises in their efforts to integrate the practice standards into the content standards. If you think about it long enough you can associate just about any practice standard with any content standard, but this sort of matrix thinking can lead to a dilution of the force of the practice standards—if you try to do everything all the time, you end up doing nothing. This diagram is an attempt to provide some higher order structure to the practice standards, just as the clusters and domains provide higher order structure to the content standards.

The progressions project for the mathematics standards, described here, is coming along. Currently we have initial drafts for progressions on Operations and Algebraic Thinking, Number and Operations in Base Ten, Fractions, Geometry, Measurement and Data, and Statistics and Probability, and are having these reviewed. We should have some progressions we can share by the end of February.