| As an essential part of the elementary education, mathematics has been paid much attention to by educators and professionals from other fields. The way to design mathematics textbooks has also attracted a huge amount of attention. The difficulty of textbooks is a facet that cannot be ignored in textbook compilation.This article aims to solve the following problems. First, establish a textbook difficulty mold to evaluate mathematics textbooks difficulty. Second, use the mold to compare the junior high school mathematics textbooks difficulty between China People of education and Mathematics Links in Oxford edition.The mathematics textbooks difficulty comparision between different nations could value our national mathematics textbooks from a new prospective so that we may better understand the features and the problems of our textbooks. The textbook difficulty mold set up in this paper can enrich the existed difficulty molds and has an significant effect on theoretical research of textbook evaluation.The textbook mentioned in the paper refers to special books for in-school students compiled by experts according to teaching goals, teaching content, teaching requirements and the characteristics of students’age and knowing level.The textbooks also comply with mathematics scientific, systematic, rigorous and practical features.The difficulty of textbooks refers to the absolute difficulty or the static difficulty, which not invovles in the use of the textbook in pratical courses.The paper studies the difficulty of mathematics textbooks from the following five subjects:Number and Algebra, Equation, Triangle, Space Geometry and Statistics. Each subject is valued from two aspects (content and exercises).The content includes concepts, theorems and examples, which is considered from the scopes of the textbook, the depth of the textbook and the difficulty of the textbook’s examples. Exercises are considered from the difficulty of the textbook’s exercises.The contribution of the scopes of the textbook, the depth of the textbook, the difficulty of the textbook’s examples and the difficulty of the textbook’s exercises depends on experts interviews and teachers questionnaires. The contribution of each subject difficulty to that of the textbook depends on its own pages in the textbook. The results show that:(1) Chinese junior high school mathematics textbook is more difficult than Mathematics Links in Oxford edition holistically.(2)On the five aspects, Chinese junior high school mathematics textbook shows more difficulties than Mathematics Links. The smallest gap of the five aspects between China and UK is Statistics and the two biggest ones are Triangle and Equation.(3) From the scopes of the textbook, we can see that Mathematics Links includes more knowledge pionts than Chinese junior high school mathematics textbook on Number and Algebra and Statistics, less on Equation and Triangle, and almost equal in Space Geometry.(4) From the depth of the textbook,it shows that Chinese textbook content is deeper than the UK one and both of the countries have deepest content in Triangle, simplest one in Statistics.(5)From the difficulty of the textbook’s examples and exercises, Chinese textbook is more difficult than Mathematics Links and both countries’exercises are more difficult than related examples. |
