ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that students in both countries might benefit from more eclectic teaching repertoires through a historical glimpse of math programmes in 1965 and 2005. The Process of Education was a manifesto for the movement to apply new ideas in cognitive psychology to the educational reform movement that developed somewhat frantically in the United States in response to the Soviet launch of Sputnik in 1957. Mental processes have forms of representation and, in education; the growing influence of Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky's ideas has focused educational attention on language in the individual mind and discourse as a social process. The American Institutes for Research study analysed Singapore's (AIR's) intended curriculum: what its national framework, textbooks, and assessments set forth as what teachers should teach and students should learn. What the United States can learn from Singapore, AIR concluded, is first and foremost the value of a mathematically logical and coherent sequence of challenging problems.
