Scientific Contexts in Pre-Service Elementary Teacher-Designed Mathematics Picture Books

Abstract

Mathematical literacy is a key point of the PISA study, and students are expected to deal with mathematics in a variety of contexts. A scientific context is one among four areas that could challenge students to understand mathematics and link between mathematics and sciences. Therefore, this study aims to investigate the scientific contexts from two mathematics picture books (MPB1 and MPB2) designed by two groups of pre-service elementary teachers in 2015. The content analysis is used as a research method to evaluate the spectrum of the scientific contexts and how they relate to mathematics contents. The findings show that MPB1 is designed based on an environmental issue, go green, while MPB2 based on farm environment. While the mathematical content of MPB2 is more challenging than MPB1 because it requires students' mathematical problem-solving.