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Ali Sabri Ipek, Recep Tayyip Erdogan University, TurkeyAbstract
Textbooks are the most important component of the intended curriculum and have a crucial role in the teaching of mathematics. The extensive use of word problems in mathematics textbooks provides strong clues about the learning/teaching opportunities available to students/teachers. The authenticity levels of the problems in textbooks, which are the basic materials of mathematics courses, affects students' problem solving skills. Based on the fact that students' reasoning and solving skills can be developed more effectively through authentic problems, this study analyzed the authenticity levels of a total of 486 word problems in a mathematics textbook used extensively at the 5th grade level in Turkiye according to a two-phase model. In the model developed by Vicente and Manchado (2017), word problems are examined first in terms of event, question, purpose, existence and specificity of the information, and then in three different levels, characterized as poor-fit, stereotyped and good-fit. The word problems in the 5th grade Turkish mathematics textbook are organized by the learning domains of numbers&operations, geometric shapes&quantities, algebraic thinking and statistics&probability. Non-parametric statistics are used for the significance of differences in the level of authenticity of word problems and learning domains. The results indicated that the word problems in statistics&probability were mostly at the good-fit and stereotyped level (39.8% and 47.7% respectively). On the other hand, the proportion of good-fit problems in numbers&quantities, geometric shapes&quantities and algebraic reasoning is quite low (19.4% in numbers&quantities, 6.4% in geometric shapes & quantities and 13.5% in algebraic reasoning). Moreover, statistically significant differences are found between the three levels of authenticity and the four learning domains. The results are discussed in the context of the design of authenticity of word problems in mathematics textbooks.
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Conference: PCE2025Stream: Curriculum Design & Development
This paper is part of the PCE2025 Conference Proceedings (View)
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To cite this article:
Ipek A. (2025) Levels of Authenticity of Word Problems in Turkish Mathematics Textbooks ISSN: 2758-0962 The Paris Conference on Education 2025: Official Conference Proceedings (pp. 829-836) https://doi.org/10.22492/issn.2758-0962.2025.63
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.22492/issn.2758-0962.2025.63
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