A Comparative Study Of Chinese And American Universities Calculus Textbook

Teaching material plays an important role in the teaching activities which can help teachers and students understand the world and get development. It carries the scientific thought, scientific knowledge, scientific method and scientific character of this subject. Also, it inherits and spreads the science and culture of the subject as well as the reflection of the national educational ideals.Under the background of curriculum reform nowadays, textbook reform is the key of curriculum reform. Comparison of textbooks can promote reviews on them, inherit and develop good manners of textbook writing. Meanwhile, it can also discard and consummate defective contents of textbooks.Education and economy develop fast in developed countries, in which thoughts and ideas may be more advanced than those in China. Through the comparison between the similar calculus books of Chinese and American, we can see the difference between them and find out the advantages and disadvantages of each. Then we can seek a best writing program. In this way, reference for the reform of teaching materials will be provided and supported.This case takes concepts, examples, exercises in textbooks and relevant supporting learning materials as the main line. Using literature method, comparative method and qualitative analysis of the above contents, we can mining and analyze the difference scientifically. Then the conclusions can help readers for guidance or reference.The exploration of this article starts from the history of the calculus teaching material in China and America. It launches a picture scroll of the beautiful history of calculus in each country. From this, readers can be clear of the revisions, creating, revising and developing... of calculus textbooks. During this long history, both China and America produce a large number of textbooks of calculus. In this article, we only choose the similar best-selling textbooks (limited to students of economy and engineer) in each country. The two textbooks are the fourth edition 《calculus》 of Tongji University in China and the sixth edition of Stewart’s 《calculus《》 in America. Specifically, theories of calculus textbooks comparison between the two countries are mainly about contents, concept introduction, difficulty of examples and the number of exercises after chapters. Others for example, the design of histories of mathematics, the number of figure captions are also covered. Through analyzing, we can find the characteristics and features as well as the difference teaching ideas between each textbook so that we can extract the soul and provide good decisions for the development of our textbooks.