NURTURING THE PROBLEM SOLVER - TOMORROW’S PROMISE MATHEMATICS FROM LONGMAN

Longman, the UK’s foremost educational publisher, has transformed mathematics into a captivating multimedia adventure in the Tomorrow’s Promise™ Mathematics Curriculum Key Stage 1-3 - a progressive course of lessons developed to help students to realise their full potential as problem-solvers. Comprising over 1,000 multi-sensory activities, Tomorrow’s Promise Mathematics enhances learning through active discovery and by helping students to improve their reasoning skills, making connections across the curriculum and using mathematical information to communicate.

Designed to provide comprehensive and well-managed coverage of the National Curriculum, 5-14 Guidelines and Northern Ireland Common Curriculum, lessons include an explanation, a practice session and differentiated activities essential for learning basic number skills, mental maths, data handling, problem solving, and shape, space and measures. Real-world problems are then used to challenge students and to further develop those skills that have been acquired.

Developed to support teaching and learning already taking place in the classroom, lessons are organised in developmental sequences to match specific learning objectives, or to address the individual needs of students. Teachers can either work within the sequences provided, or arrange them to support an existing curriculum or schemes of work.

Tomorrow’s Promise Mathematics is divided into a series of units addressing key mathematical concepts. Each unit is then split into lessons containing three activities. These include Let’s Explore, which introduces and develops new concepts through a highly visual and motivating lesson; Let’s Practice, which through a series of questions, guides the student towards more abstract applications of those concepts; and Check-Up, a series of questions designed to verify that the concepts have been thoroughly understood by that student.

In levels 4-8, each level of Mathematics courseware is divided firstly into units and then into specific lessons. Each lesson comprises a series of activities including Diagnostic, which assesses the student’s current knowledge of the concept; Instructional Lesson, which introduces and develops the concept in each objective and provides students with real-life experiences; Guided Practice, sessions which provide the student with progressive and sensitive feedback; and Independent Practice, a test used to determine each student’s understanding of a mathematical concept. Final scores are then sent back to the student for the teacher to review.

Support tools designed to help the student include a pop-up Glossary with word meanings and pronunciations; a Reader which reads instructions to students out loud; a Progress button to allow students to check their current scores and an on-screen Ruler which can be dragged to any location and changed from a horizontal to a vertical orientation. Also included is an on-screen Protractor which allows students to measure angles; an on-screen Calculator for working through formulae and Show Me, a facility which can be accessed to demonstrate problem-solving methods within the context of the activity during Guided Practice Sessions.

Compass™,a powerful and flexible management tool, designed to direct and to monitor the progress of all learners, can be used by Teachers to rearrange the curriculum to reflect a particular teaching style. Learning sequences can be quickly and easily aligned to match national guidelines and standards, to support the school syllabus and specific schemes of mathematics work, to complement textbooks and other print-based resources, as well as to support an Individual Educational Plan (IEP) for students with special educational needs.

A National Curriculum Assessment Test (NCAT) facility that works in conjunction with the Compass Management System, assesses each student’s level of achievement and identifies their strengths and weaknesses. A programme of learning, designed to provide a suitable and appropriate path for students who need to re-visit topics is then devised by NCAT, while high-achievers are challenged by a more demanding work programme. Easy-to-use features enable Teachers to create individual, group and class reports, which can also be customised to reflect national guidelines and standards.

Mathematics Curriculum Key Stage 1-3 forms just a small section of the Tomorrow’s Promise Multimedia Curriculum. Schools with a limited budget can purchase Tomorrow’s Promise in modules, by subject level and by the number of users, to achieve cost-effective, flexible implementations that is not an option with other integrated learning systems.

Tomorrow's Promise comes complete with a comprehensive, award-winning installation, implementation, training and support service.

Gerry Daish, Sales and Marketing Director, Longman, said "Tomorrow’s Promise Numeracy offers an engaging and comprehensive curriculum for students acquiring the fundamental skills to become maths problem solvers. They use the wealth of multi-sensory activities to learn by active discovery and extend their knowledge in practical, real-world contexts."

For further details, please contact Denise Lyne, Longman Logotron, 124 Cambridge Science Park, Milton Road, Cambridge, CB4 4ZS. Telephone: 01223 425558 Ex. 725 Fax: 01223 425349 Email: dlyne@logo.com ™Tomorrow’s Promise and Compass Management Systems are registered trademarks of the Jostens Learning Corporation.

12th JUNE 1998