Secondary School Mathematics Curriculum Improvement Study

The Secondary School Mathematics Curriculum Improvement Study (SSMCIS) was the name of an American mathematics education program that stood for both the name of a curriculum and the name of the project that was responsible for developing curriculum materials. It is considered part of the second round of initiatives in the ""New Math"" movement of the 1960s. The program was led by Howard F. Fehr, a professor at Columbia University Teachers College.The program's signature goal was to create a unified treatment of mathematics and eliminate the traditional separate per-year studies of algebra, geometry, trigonometry, and so forth, that was typical of American secondary schools. Instead, the treatment unified those branches by studying fundamental concepts such as sets, relations, operations, and mappings, and fundamental structures such as groups, rings, fields, and vector spaces. The SSMCIS program produced six courses' worth of class material, intended for grades 7 through 12, in textbooks called Unified Modern Mathematics. Some 25,000 students took SSMCIS courses nationwide during the late 1960s and early 1970s.