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Interactive Mathematics Program

Key Curriculum Press Interactive Math program

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Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionJul 1, 2025
Entity authorityQ6045297
Source-derived summary

The Interactive Mathematics Program (IMP) is a four-year, problem-based mathematics curriculum for high schools. It was one of several curricula funded by the National Science Foundation and designed around the 1989 National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) standards. The IMP books were authored by Dan Fendel and Diane Resek, professors of mathematics at San Francisco State University, and by Lynne Alper and Sherry Fraser. IMP was published by Key Curriculum Press in 1997 and sold in 2012 to It's About Time.

Curriculum

Designed in response to national reports pointing to the need for a major overhaul in mathematics education, the IMP curriculum is markedly different in structure, content, and pedagogy from courses more typically found in the high school sequence.

Each book of the curriculum is divided into five- to eight-week units, each having a central problem or theme. This larger problem is intended to serve as motivation for students to develop the underlying skills and concepts needed to solve it, through solving a variety of smaller related problems.

There is an emphasis on asking students to work together in collaborative groups.

It is hoped that communication skills will be developed; exercises aimed at this goal are embedded throughout the curriculum, through the use of group and whole class discussions, the use of writing to present and clarify mathematical solutions; in some IEP classes, formal oral presentations are required.

The IMP curriculum expects students to make nearly daily use of a scientific graphing calculator.

Editorial summary

Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Interactive Mathematics Program” is key Curriculum Press Interactive Math program. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Interactive, Mathematics and Program, not as a finished interpretation.

Editorial reviewA concise reference frame for defining the subject, testing terminology and identifying the institution closest to the evidence. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1989, 1997, 2012—that can be checked directly. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. For this dossier, Interactive, Mathematics and Program is the immediate research focus.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The phrase “key Curriculum Press Interactive Math program” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.

Evidence profile

Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 1, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q6045297. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1989, 1997 and 2012.

Critical limits

The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.

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  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Interactive Mathematics Program”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Interactive Mathematics Program primary sources, Interactive Mathematics Program archive and Interactive research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from Interactive Mathematics Program” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.