Great Depression Era in the US

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The decline of available employment in the 1920s with the fluctuation during the 1930s forced adolescents stay at schools for longer periods. In consequence, schools and teachers needed to anticipate two potential problems. Firstly, students needed to be prepared to face the competitiveness of employment thus mathematics was integrated with some specific jobs. Detroit connected the lessons with the daily experience of pupils outside of school, Minnesota conducted a project by school construction and a nearby farm, and Georgia trained students to solve problems about installment, investment, credit, and taxation (Stanic, George, and Kilpatrick, 2003).

Another problem schools and teachers realized is that every student has different levels of mathematics proficiency and career plan. To accommodate many possibilities, the context and advancement of the material needed to be varied. Stanic, George, and Kilpatrick (2003) stated that to enable students to learn based on their potency and dream career, three levels of algebra courses could be chosen and learned in various ranges of time. Besides, machine mathematics was provided to develop students' calculating skills and shop mathematics was available for students who did not pass algebra (Stanic, George, and Kilpatrick, 2003).

The applications of mathematics were extended in many areas. For instance, statistics was developed significantly due to the growing sophistication of government statistical surveillance (Cohen, 2003). In fact, one effect of the Second World War is that mathematics was extended in a wider range of fields, such as psychology, sociology, and industrial management (Hayden, 1981). This added even further to the number of people who needed to study mathematics and increased the areas of human endeavor upon which mathematics had an impact.

A growing number of mathematics textbooks in this era engaged students in many concrete problems. For instance, Wentworth and Smith (1910) connected geometry with daily contexts such as drawing the plan of a Gothic window, locating the pitcher in a baseball diamond, drawing the plan of a flower bed, and so forth. Besides, algebraic functions were also connected to the economy like in Smith (1904).