| Since the 21st century, countries around the world have begun reforming mathematics curriculum for basic education. China and Japan, important countries in East Asia, also chose to conduct a national reform to the mathematics curriculum. Starting in 2010, Japan implemented new mathematics textbooks in junior high school, while in recent years the new mathematics textbooks in China are a focus of debate in mathematics education. Due to this debate, it is necessary to compare the characteristics of various materials and the directionality of reform. These have important theoretical significance to the reform of new materials. For instance, examples are an important component of textbooks. Examples selected for use in textbooks, have a direct impact on the student's efficiency to learn new course materials. Therefore a comparative study of examples in different textbooks is necessary.By comparatively analyzing the difficulty of examples from Japanese and Chinese junior high school mathematics textbooks, this article aims to achieve the following three purposes. First, this article aims to achieve a deeper understanding of the teaching concept of the new textbooks in both countries by comparatively studying the new and old textbooks. This is followed by exploring the new textbooks in line with China's current teaching philosophy of teaching. Secondly, this article is to reveal features and deficiencies of a variety of teaching materials through a comparative analysis of differences that will lead to suggestions for republishing the materials. Finally, this article strives to provide some references for teaching in the classroom by comparing the overall difficulty of some mathematics textbook examples, doing a questionnaire on some students, and studying the advantages and disadvantages of the new materials being taught in the classroom.This article is comprised of three parts. The first part is mostly about the literature review and analysis. It also has a more systematic introduction to teaching materials, their structures and the basic theory of materials'development and evaluation. The second part focuses on comparative research. By using integrated models of difficulty, it does the comparative research for the exploration level, background level, operation level, the amount of reasoning and knowledge levels.The third part is the final chapter. Through a comparative analysis and practice of teaching and research, it points out that the textbooks used in both countries are insufficient in practice. It goes on to propose advice on changes to the materials and the need for further research.Overall, the results show that the difficulty level of the examples in China's comprehensive textbooks are significantly higher than that of Japan's. On the level of exploration, the two textbooks are almost the same. On the background level, Japan's textbooks are higher than China's teaching materials. This is especially true in the new Japanese textbook examples, there is comparatively more knowledge on the background related to public information. However, both countries lack background information of"situational science". On levels of computing, reasoning and knowledge of the overall extent, China's is significantly higher than Japan's. Examples in the Japanese textbooks pay more attention to heavy numerical calculations, while China's concentrates on symbolic operations, especially complicated ones. There are more sophisticated reasoning examples in Chinese textbooks than in Japanese textbooks. Japanese textbooks are mainly about examples with a single point of theme-based knowledge, but China's contain many more points of knowledge. This is also the representative of the three characteristics of the traditional "double-base" and it indicates that China's traditional concept of "double-base" has a great impact on the integrated difficulty with China's textbooks. |
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