GSE Algebra II/Advanced Algebra
Algebra II/Advanced Algebra is the culminating course in a sequence of three high school courses designed to ensure career and college readiness. It is designed to prepare students for fourth course options relevant to their career pursuits. The standards in the three-course high school sequence specify the mathematics that all students should study in order to be college and career ready. Additional mathematics content is provided in fourth credit courses and advanced courses including pre-calculus, calculus, advanced statistics, discrete mathematics, and mathematics of finance courses. High school course content standards are listed by conceptual categories including Number and Quantity, Algebra, Functions, Geometry, and Statistics and Probability. Conceptual categories portray a coherent view of high school mathematics content; a student’s work with functions, for example, crosses a number of traditional course boundaries, potentially up through and including calculus. Standards for Mathematical Practice provide the foundation for instruction and assessment.
Unit 1: Students will revisit solving quadratic equations in this unit. Students explore relationships between number systems: whole numbers, integers, rational numbers, real numbers, and complex numbers. Students will perform operations with complex numbers and solve quadratic equations with complex solutions. Students will also extend the laws of exponents to rational exponents and use those properties to evaluate and simplify expressions containing rational exponents.
Unit 2: This unit develops the structural similarities between the system of polynomials and the system of integers. Students draw on analogies between polynomial arithmetic and base-ten computation, focusing on properties of operations, particularly the distributive property. Students connect multiplication of polynomials with multiplication of multi-digit integers, and division of polynomials with long division of integers. Students will find inverse functions and verify by composition that one function is the inverse of another function.
Unit 3: In this unit, students continue their study of polynomials by identifying zeros and making connections between zeros of a polynomial and solutions of a polynomial equation. Students will see how the Fundamental Theorem of Algebra can be used to determine the number of solutions of a polynomial equation and will find all the roots of those equations. Students will graph polynomial functions and interpret the key characteristics of the function.
Unit 4: Rational numbers extend the arithmetic of integers by allowing division by all numbers except 0. Similarly, rational expressions extend the arithmetic of polynomials by allowing division by all polynomials except the zero polynomial. A central theme of this unit is that the arithmetic of rational expressions is governed by the same rules as the arithmetic of rational numbers. Similarly, radical expressions follow the rules governed by irrational numbers.
Unit 5: Students extend their work with exponential functions to include solving exponential equations with logarithms. They analyze the relationship between these two functions.
Unit 6: In this unit students synthesize and generalize what they have learned about a variety of function families. They explore the effects of transformations on graphs of diverse functions, including functions arising in an application, in order to abstract the general principle that transformations on a graph always have the same effect regardless of the type of the underlying functions. They identify appropriate types of functions to model a situation, they adjust parameters to improve the model, and they compare models by analyzing appropriateness of fit and making judgments about the domain over which a model is a good fit. They determine whether it is best to model with multiple functions creating a piecewise function. Students will also explore the sum of finite geometric series.
Unit 7: In this unit, students see how the visual displays and summary statistics they learned in earlier grades relate to different types of data and to probability distributions. They identify different ways of collecting data— including sample surveys, experiments, and simulations—and the role that randomness and careful design play in the conclusions that can be drawn.