Opportunities for the development of geometrical reasoning in current textbooks in the UK and Japan
Fujita, Taro and Jones, Keith (2002) Opportunities for the development of geometrical reasoning in current textbooks in the UK and Japan. Proceedings of the British Society for Research into Learning Mathematics, 22, (3), 79-84.
Developing a good model of the school geometry curriculum continues to be one of the most important tasks in curricular design in mathematics. This paper reports on an initial analysis of current best-selling textbooks used in lower secondary schools in Japan and the UK (specifically England and Scotland). The analysis indicates that, following the specification of the mathematics curriculum in these countries, Japanese textbooks set out to develop students’ deductive reasoning skills through the explicit teaching of proof in geometry, whereas comparative UK textbooks tend, at this level, to concentrate on finding angles, measurement, drawing, and so on, coupled with a modicum of opportunities for conjecturing and inductive reasoning. The available research suggests that each approach has its own strengths and weaknesses. Finding ways of capitalising on the strengths and mitigating the weaknesses could prove helpful in formulating new curricular models and designing new student textbooks.
|Keywords:||pedagogy, curriculum, teaching, learning, geometry, mathematics, Japan, Japanese, England, geometric, geometrical, textbook, deductive reasoning, proof, conjecturing, inductive reasoning, school|
|Subjects:||L Education > L Education (General)
L Education > LB Theory and practice of education > LB1603 Secondary Education. High schools
L Education > LB Theory and practice of education > LB2361 Curriculum
|Divisions:||University Structure - Pre August 2011 > School of Education > Professional Practice & Pedagogy
Faculty of Social and Human Sciences > Southampton Education School > Mathematics, Science & Health Education (MSHE)
|Date Deposited:||21 Feb 2005|
|Last Modified:||31 Mar 2016 11:27|
|RDF:||RDF+N-Triples, RDF+N3, RDF+XML, Browse.|
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