A Comparative Study Of The Setting Of Real-life Problem Situations In Chinese, Japanese, And American Junior High School Mathematics Textbooks

In the information society,developing students’ core quality is the specific direction of "what kind of person education should cultivate" in the 21 st century.The cultivation of core competency is inseparable from real,complex and open problem context.This article through to the junior middle school mathematics textbooks of China,Japan,the United States,trying to find the advantages and disadvantages of Chinese textbooks in setting realistic problem context,in order to provide support for improving the quality of realistic problem situation in textbooks of our country and cultivating students’ core competency.The research question is: What are the similarities and differences between the real problem contexts in the four dimensions of authenticity,relevance,complexity and openness in the Chinese,Japanese and American editions of junior middle school math textbooks?Considering the close connection between the knowledge of "statistics and probability" and the real society,as well as the statistical findings in the project of "Problem Situation in Mathematics Textbooks" of the People’s Education Association,there are some deficiencies in problem contexts in this field,the research selects the real problem context in "statistics and probability" as the research object.For the above problems,the literature analysis method was firstly adopted.By combing existing literature,the analysis framework of the problem context was constructed from the dimensions of authenticity,relevance,complexity and openness.Then,based on cultural differences,international education evaluation and other aspects of consideration,the representative textbooks of the three countries are determined for comparison.Secondly,according to the analysis framework,the content analysis method is used to code the real problem context.Finally,Excel was used to conduct descriptive statistics on the coded data,and the chi-square test in SPSS20.0 software was used to explore whether there were statistically significant differences in various dimensions of the real problem context in the four editions of textbooks.If there were,the effect size was used to further describe the actual differences.Through the comparison of realistic problem situations in middle school mathematics textbooks of China,Japan and the United States,the following conclusions are drawn:(1)In terms of contextual authenticity,the proportion of constructional contextual settings in the four editions of textbooks is significantly higher than that of fully real contexts and semi-real contexts.There are some differences between the PEP and MIF textbooks in statistics and reality,and the corresponding effect size is close to the medium effect.The PEP version is significantly higher than the MIF version in the completely real context.The proportion of "semi-real" setting in PEP textbook is obviously lower than that of "constructional" and "fully real" contexts.(2)In terms of contextual relevance,the four editions of textbooks all show that: generally related contexts are dominant,highly related contexts are supplementary,and irrelevant contexts are basically not involved".There is no statistically significant difference between the four editions of textbooks in different contexts of relevance.For highly correlated contexts,there are certain differences in statistics and reality between PEP,Shanghai and MIF textbooks,and the corresponding effect sizes were between medium effect and large effect.Among them,compared with Shanghai and MIF textbooks,PEP textbooks have the lowest proportion in the context setting of "situation-based interpretation of mathematical results".(3)In terms of context complexity,there is no statistically significant difference between the four editions of textbooks,and the proportion of simple context setting is significantly higher than that of complex context.There are significant differences in the distribution of three complex situations in PEP textbooks,among which "complex quantitative relationship" situation has the lowest proportion.(4)In the aspect of contextual openness,there is a statistically significant difference between the four editions of textbooks,and the corresponding effect size is close to small effect.;There is no statistically significant difference between the four editions of textbooks in the three types of open contexts.Based on the research conclusions and combined with specific examples,the following suggestions are proposed for the compilation of realistic problem contexts in PEP junior middle school mathematics textbook :(1)Improving the design of semi-real contexts to experience the connection between mathematics and reality;(2)Balancing different types of highly correlated contexts and strengthening the correlation between the context and the problem;(3)Increasing the context of "complex quantitative relationship" to improve the complexity level of problem context.