The Mathematics in Action project aims to empower college mathematics students with a real-world mathematical literacy that will provide a solid foundation for future study in mathematics and other disciplines. The project was developed by the Consortium for Foundation Mathematics, a team of fourteen SUNY and CUNY faculty, with support from the National Science Foundation (DUE 9455638), and is based on the AMATYC Crossroads Standards.

The project's goal to empower students mathematically focuses on developing desired student outcomes in five main areas: number sense, symbolic sense, a general function sense, a thorough linear function sense, and a sense of nonlinear relationships. The word “sense” in each of these areas certainly conveys developing requisite skills, but far more than that, it means generating mathematical intuition and building techniques of reasoning.

To achieve desired student outcomes, project materials are written with the expectation that by completing the course, students would be able to perform tasks beyond the basic skills/knowledge level. These tasks include extracting relevant data to solve realistic problems, analyzing and interpreting graphical and tabular data, recognizing and expressing, in verbal, numerical, graphical, and symbolical format, the patterns displayed by linear data, and identifying equivalent variable relationships in numerical, algebraic, and graphical format and translating those relationships from one representation to any of the others.

The project's objectives extend to developing general education competencies through its realistic contextual approach to learning mathematics.