tandfonline.com – Mathematical problem solving in textbooks from twelve countries

ABSTRACT

A selection of secondary school mathematics textbooks from twelve countries on five continents was analysed to better understand the support they might be in teaching and learning mathematical problem solving. Over 5700 tasks were compared to the information provided earlier in each textbook to determine whether each task could be solved by mimicking available templates or whether a solution had to be constructed without guidance from the textbook. There were similarities between the twelve textbooks in the sense that most tasks could be solved using a template as guidance. A significantly lower proportion of the tasks required a solution to be constructed. This was especially striking in the initial sets of tasks. Textbook descriptions indicating problem solving did not guarantee that a task solution had to be constructed without the support of an available template.