Requirements in mathematics textbooks: a five-dimensional analysis of textbook exercises and examples

ABSTRACT

Mathematics textbooks play a very important role in mathematics education and textbook tasks are used by students for practice to a large extent. Since the nature of the tasks may influence the way students think it is important that the textbooks provide a balance of a variety of tasks. The analyses of the requirements in textbook tasks contain the usual dimensions of content, cognitive demands, question type and contextual features. The aim of this study is to embed a new fifth dimension into the framework: mathematical activities. This addresses the question of what a student should do in a particular textbook task: to represent, to compute, to interpret or to use argumentation. The analysis encompassed more than 22,000 tasks from the most commonly used Croatian mathematics textbooks in the 6th, 7th and 8th grade. The results show that the textbooks do not provide a full range of task types. There is an emphasis on computation, while argumentation and interpretation activities, reflective thinking and open answer tasks are underrepresented. The study revealed that incorporating mathematical activities into the multidimensional framework of textbook tasks may help to better understand the opportunities to learn which are afforded students by using mathematics textbooks.

KEYWORDS:

• Content analysis
• mathematics textbook
• task types
• textbook analysis
• mathematical activities
• textbook research

SUBJECT CLASSIFICATION CODE:

• 97U20

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Prof Dr Edith Schneider and Prof Dr Werner Peschek from the Institut für Didaktik der Mathematik – Austrian Educational Competence Centre, Alpen-Adria Universität Klagenfurt for all their helpful suggestions and discussions during the coding and analysing process.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.