The Connecticut State Department of education has adapted the 2020-2021 Priority Instructional Content in ELA/Literacy and Mathematics to assist in guiding the important work of addressing mathematics education for the coming school year. As the 2020–2021 school year begins, mathematics educators must name content priorities and support focus on critical on-grade-level material. This webpage provides a searchable interface for the 20-21 priority content, with the text of the recommendation for each Common Core State Standard. In addition, Student Achievement Partners has tagged some standards as "Widely Applicable Prerequisite", "Modeling Standard" or "Essential Concepts from Catalyzing Change". According to Student Achievement Partners, "Standards that are considered 'widely applicable prerequisites' are those with relatively wide applicability across a wide range of postsecondary work and often not taught for course credit in postsecondary settings. Modeling standards are those that lend themselves to developing and analyzing mathematical models for real world phenomena and generally have greater overall importance in the high school sequence of courses. Finally, standards identified as essential in Catalyzing Change in High School Mathematics: Initiating Critical Conversations (NCTM, 2018) are also marked as indicated above" (SAP, 2020). Some standards have multiple pieces, which are shown bundled together in this document. Where one of the tags above is applied to one piece, it is shown with the standard as a whole.
The Connecticut Core Standards for Mathematics are based upon a progression of learning. It is essential to identify the pre-requisite knowledge needed for student success on grade level content based upon these progressions. The Coherence Map is a tool that assists in identifying gaps in a student's knowledge by tracing a standard back through its logical pre-requisites. These skills should be strategically taught right before the connected unit of study or incorporated as spiral review or as part of instructional routines and procedures. Teaching these skills as connected to grade-level content deepens students' mathematical understanding. The coherence map does not include some additional standards (Marked (+)). This document links to every standard where available.
The following words are used in the recommendation for school year 20-21. While these terms are used broadly as defined below, there may be places where the term only applies to part of the standard. This document has specific guidance for each standard which explains how to combine, eliminate or emphasize the standard.
| Combine | Give less time and attention to individual lessons by merging a group of lessons in the same domain. |
| Limit | Cut back on the number of brief, repetitious practice problems that would normally be assigned to students for these topic(s). |
| Emphasize/Prioritize | Elevate the importance of one or more standards, concepts, strategies, or problem types above others. Emphasizing is a matter of giving stronger weight to specified things in the cluster or standard, not a matter of limiting entirely to the specified things. |
| Reduce | Lessen the normal emphasis on specific standards, concepts, strategies, or problem types. |
| None | Teach the standard without modifications. |