Exercises In The Junior High School Mathematics Textbooks In China And The United States Comparative Study

During the past cross-national comparisons of mathematics achievement, when included samples of Chinese and U.S students, the findings have been that Chinese students perform mathematical tasks at much higher levels of proficiency than U.S students. However, studies comparing performances have tended to assess performance on fairly routine computational tasks or those solved by straightforward application of algorithmic procedures. When tasks requiring mathematical thinking and reasoning, or problem solving, U.S students can perform better than Chinese. Why? To find the reason, this paper constructed a 3-dimensional framework (for contextual features, performance requirements and solving method) to analyze the textbook problems of Chinese and U.S. The results show that there are many differences in the two countries, for example, illustrative context with pictorial representation or story; explanation required; problem solving; learning style; special requirement; family mathematics etc. The author also analyzed the reason in three aspects: teaching aim, mathematics value and social culture.In the second section, the author pointed there are 5 aspects should be paid attention when we make up textbook problems, they are: 0)the expression of the problems should suit the cognition system of students; (2)problems should encourage students to think and embody much mathematics thought; (3)there should have all kinds of problems in the textbooks to meet student' learning style; (4)questions don't require only one kind solution; (5) there should have good connections between problems.