A Comparative Study On Matrices Of Chinese,Us,Japanese And Singapore Mathematices Textbooks

In order to keep the mathematics curriculum with the times, many countries in the world continue to reform the mathematics curriculum for elementary education. Throughout the education reform in China, in addition to the change of mathematics content, we also made a corresponding change in the teaching method and student status. It is well-known that, course content is the knowledge that student should to know and the carrier of knowledge is textbook. In recent years, Chinese new mathematics textbook has become a topic of concern of mathematics pedagogy.In this study, starting form several textbooks of Shanghai Education Press, USA Prentice Hall Press, Japanese Institute Press, and Singapore Panpac Education Press, taking matrices content as the carrier, we made a static text analysis for these textbooks. The analysis mainly focuses on three issues:what are the characteristics in the selection of matrices contents/topics and the order of contents/topics about these textbooks, what are the similarities and differences of the presentation of matrices contents in these (concepts, worked examples, summary, illustrations, to-be-solved problems) textbooks, what are the expectations for students in these textbooks. We use the content analysis method, the comparative method, the concept mapping, and the multi-factor model of difficulty, design a analytical framework. Through the quantitative evaluation and the qualitative analysis, we come to the following conclusions:About the selection of matrices content, the differences between several textbooks are following:Singapore textbook covers the least contents, and Japanese textbook covers most. Moreover, US textbook focus on operations of matrices. About the order of matrices content, there are spiral characteristics in US textbooks, and straight characteristics in Shanghai textbook. In general, the concepts and the inclusion operations of matrices between different countries are similar, but there are differences in matrices application.In the presentation of matrices content, the inclusions of concepts (numbers, structures and contents) are not the same, and there are many different characteristics in teaching methods. In the presentation of matrices worked examples, the process of problem-solving in US textbooks shows diversely, the type of worked examples in Japanese textbook are rich, and using of graphing calculators in Singapore textbook are widely. In the presentation of summary, there are complex styles in Shanghai, US, and Singapore except Japan. Meanwhile, US textbook contains a large number of illustrations and TBS sets.For the expectations of ability and problem solving, there is no absolute advantage between the textbooks generally. As for details, we can conclude that the level of computing in Shanghai and Japan textbooks is higher than US and Singapore.Finally, combined with the results, we propose some opinions and suggestions as follows:optimizing the structure of the knowledge of complex number, increasing the number of illustrations to rich the textbook culture and to enhance interest, increasing the number of TBS sets, increasing the integration of course and information technology.