Problem posing activities in primary school mathematics textbooks

Abstract

Textbooks are important for mathematics as they are for other courses. Problem posing is one of the important activities in mathematics education. In this manner, the goal of this study is to analyse the problem-posing activities in primary school mathematics textbooks offered by Ministry of National Education and used in 2017-2018 and 2018-2019 school years. For this purpose, 10 primary school mathematics textbooks were analysed with document analysis method according to their years, grade levels, learning domains, sub-learning domains and types of problem posing. We analyzed the number of problems posed, learning domains that it includes, the number of sub-learning, and problem types. Results showed that there are more activities in the textbooks in the school year of 2017-2018 than in the textbooks used in the school year of 2018-2019 in all grade levels except second grade level. In addition, no problem posing activity was found in any of the first-grade books. It is considered that increasing the number of problem-posing activities in the textbooks and diversifying the problem-posing type are necessary.