A Study On Teachers' Use Of Textbooks

This thesis investigates how teachers use textbooks in mathematics teaching in Minhang District of Shanghai,and compares the use patterns of textbooks among teachers with different teaching experience.In this study,(mathematics)textbooks refer especially to mathematics materials in primary schools of nine-year compulsory education published from Shanghai Education Press in 2011.According to research literature in terms of textbooks and its use style,this research built an analysis framework: the theoretical relationship between textbooks' components and their use patterns.Teacher questionnaire and teacher one-to-one interview were designed and developed to collect data.The participants involved 85 Shanghai in-service mathematics teachers from seven maintained primary schools.Through all processes of data collection and analysis,quantitative approaches were triangulated and complemented by qualitative methods.Finally,the results revealed that mathematics teachers in Minhang District Shanghai relied heavily on using textbooks in teaching practice of primary school,and prefer to the use pattern “Integrating” of textbooks.In addition,most of teachers assert that this set of textbooks was short of the use of Information Technology and the open-ended exercises.Although generally there was diversity in use pattern of textbooks among teachers with different teaching experiences,the differences in the use pattern of textbooks were not statistically significant to each component of textbooks.More interestingly,younger teachers more prefer to the use pattern “freeing” for using examples' answers in textbooks,and statistical significances among teachers of different types in this component were attained.Some suggestions were provided in the end.