Comparative Study Of Mathematics Textbooks’ Application Problems Between China And Britain

Mathematics application has always been a hot research topic in education,and its research value has been increasingly affirmed.Teaching materials as the carriers of knowledge,determine teachers’ teaching directions and contents and reflect a country’s educational beliefs.With the promotion of international interaction,the exchange between China and Britain is getting closer,since Britain has first-class educational resources,comparing the mathematical applications of high school mathematics textbooks in China and Britain is of great significance and value to the development of China’s education.Based on the above situation,the research questions to be solved are as follows:(1)What are the differences between the mathematical application problems in high school mathematics textbooks in China and the UK?(2)What are the reasons for the differences in mathematical application problems in high school mathematics textbooks in China and the UK?In this study,the 2017 edition of the textbook from the People’s Education Press of China and the A-Level textbook from the Cambridge University Press of the UK are selected as the objects of comparison,and the differences between the two editions of mathematical function application for problem-solving are quantitatively analyzed in the following three dimensions:(1)the degree of knowledge synthesis;(2)the context of the problem;(3)the way of problem representation.The following findings are obtained.(1)In terms of problem contexts,both versions have the highest number of context-free problems,while public context problems account for the largest proportion of contextual problems in the Human Education edition and personal context problems account for the largest proportion in the English edition.In general,the level of problem context in the Chinese version of the textbook is higher than that in the British version.(2)In terms of problem representation,the examples in both editions used more symbolic-textual and diagrammatic-textual representations than pure textual representations,and the level of problem representation in the British edition was slightly higher than that in the Chinese edition.(3)For the level of knowledge synthesis,both editions of the textbook had the largest proportion of moderately difficult and challenging exercises,and the level of knowledge synthesis in the British edition was slightly higher than that in the Chinese edition.Three reasons were found after analyzing the aforementioned differences:(1)the differences in the order of arrangement of the function contents between the two editions of the textbook affected the difficulty of the mathematical application problems in the examples;(2)the differences in the educational concepts of the two countries caused the differences in the problem contexts of the examples in the textbook;(3)the cultural differences between the two countries.Based on the above analysis,the author makes three suggestions for high school mathematics teaching:(1)To grasp the teaching content as a whole and pay attention to the construction of mathematical knowledge system;(2)To pay attention to the creation of situations;(3)To pay attention to the cultivation of reading ability.