The capacity of two Australian eighth-grade textbooks for promoting proportional reasoning

Abstract

In the middle grades mathematics curriculum, proportional reasoning is fundamental to many topics, and hence, there is considerable scope for instruction to focus on assisting students to recognize the proportional structure of many problem situations. Yet, proportional reasoning, and particularly the study of ratio and proportion, pose considerable difficulty for students. Drawing on proportional reasoning literature as well as mathematics curriculum reform principles underpinning the current mathematics syllabus documents in Queensland, Australia, we devised criteria for textbook analysis, and applied these to eighth-grade Australian mathematics textbooks, to explore the degree to which knowledge connections and proportional reasoning were promoted. The analysis revealed a predominance of calculation procedures, with relatively few tasks and explanations to support conceptual understanding.

Keywords:

• textbooks
• proportional reasoning
• multiplicative structures