Geometrical Transformations in the Mathematics Textbooks in Kosovo and Catalonia

Abstract

The rationale behind this study concerns the issues school administrators and teachers/prospective teachers face over the progress of these students in mathematics classrooms in two different countries (Spain/Catalonia and Kosovo). This study aimed to present a method of examining primary school mathematics textbooks with the purpose of evaluating students' expected past learning and comparing students' expected geometrical transformations learning across the different curricula. The analytical procedure of the examination of text content as presented in this study is itself a diagnostic technique for assessment of the students' past learning, which addressed the main objective of the study. As a main result, we found that the organization of content is based upon a disconnected way of presentation about transformations, and a few attentions paid to variability issues.

Networked Analysis of a Teaching Unit for Primary School Symmetries in the Form of an E-Book

“…Primary and secondary school mathematics curricula have a common core of content around the world, mainly arithmetic with whole numbers, decimal numbers, and fractions, polygons and circle geometry, measurement, equations, some types of functions, basic trigonometry, and others [5]. However, in some countries, other mathematics topics are only sometimes included in the curricula or are considered as "dispensable" by many teachers, who feel free to skip over those topics when, allegedly, they are short of time, one such topic being plane isometries [6,7]. Nevertheless, isometries are a very useful tool for ordinary life and many areas of elementary, middle, and higher mathematics [8], with symmetries being the most relevant one [9], since they have to do with regularities, which are easily perceived by students.…”