Comparative Study Of “Rational Number Operations” In Chinese And English Primary Mathematics Textbooks

With the implementation of the basic education course reform,China has obtained many achievements on the study of curriculum. In the curriculum reform, the comparative study of teaching material is always the key point.Although there are lots of comparative studies of international teachering meterial, there are a few about the England mainly on overall and difficulties. This article selects Chinese textbook of Zhejiang Version and that of British SMP as the two sets of teaching materials to do the c omparative study on the content of rational number operation, hoping to understand th e two different versions’ advantages and disadvantages The advantages of SMP could be applied to our textbook writing and reform on this section.Combining comparative analysis framework and difficulty analysis framework c onstructed by Charalambos, this article does comparative studies of the two books on the section of rational number operation from the point of horizontal dimensions, verti cal dimensions and difficulty. The horizontal dimension means the background and fr amework while vertical dimension means the whole teaching process. The backgroun d study includes two parts: Name,Grade,Pages and Requirement. The framework stud y is mainly about the order of knowledge points and exercises.In the vertical dimensio n, the article focuses on the introduction, deduction and induction of the plus/minus a nd multiplication/division operating process. The study of teaching material difficulty includes the contention and difficulty of the book and difficulty of the exercises. The s tudy shows that the Chinese textbook of Zhejiang Version focuses mainly on the teach ing process done by the teacher while that of SMP focuses on the learning process don e by the students. The former has the higher requirement and more systematic knowle dge points while the later has more variable types of content and a lower requirement.