Students are still required to have the right answer – it's a myth that they're not – and teachers in older grades often include the traditional methods and algorithms in the lesson.
But a key part of the standards is for students to think through the problem, and with a teacher's guidance, discover an approach for themselves.
That's opposed to the more traditional – and some would argue, passive – way of teaching math. Previously, a teacher modeled how to solve the problem and students practiced it.
But educators like Gard said that approach didn't give students the chance to think through the problem themselves, And so, in years past, many struggled with word problems. They never mastered the skill of deciding how to approach the problems, because that decision had been made by the teacher or textbook.
"That's where kids always fell apart in word problems," Berry said. "They wanted to pick out numbers, but they did not understand what the problem was about."
In teacher Lisa Burke's fifth grade class, students are the ones who suggest ways to solve a problem. Recently, while teaching about multiplication of fractions, she presented students with a problem about a patch of garden.
To model the garden, she drew a three by four rectangle, which was divided into 12 equal parts. Then she shaded a patch of the garden measuring two parts down and three across.
Eventually, students can name the fractions that the shaded parts represent, and they wrote 2/3 on the side of the rectangle where two of the three squares were shaded and 3/4 along the side where three of the four squares were shaded.
That visual representation helps students like Talon Eidson, 12, grasp the meaning of a fraction. "I can picture it in my mind," he said.
Students then realize they can multiply the two fractions together: 2/3 x 3/4.
"They're beginning to think about it," Burke said. "Eventually they get to that point."
The answer is 6/12, or simplified, 1/2.
With this approach, some students progress at their own pace, and Burke has noticed that some stay longer on the grid: drawing it, counting it, and struggling through the concepts. Meanwhile, others quickly progress past it, preferring to work through the formula.
And that, too, is part of the new approach. Spending more time on the introduction of a concept, so students understand it on a deeper level, means less remediation is needed.