A Comparative Study On The Difficulty Of Trigonometric In Mathematics Textbooks Between Mainland And Hong Kong

As a result of the same cultural background,there are a lot of similar mathematical pedagogical methods between Hong Kong and the mainland in China.Since 21 st century,Hong Kong has carried out a great number of curriculum reforms,drawing on the foreign educational experience with the basis of the actual situation of its local education.According to the new rankings in the TIMSS,students in Hong Kong have made great achievements in math.Function is a key teaching point in senior high schools,which is throughout the whole mathematics study in senior high schools.Meanwhile,the trigonometric function is a branch of function,and learning trigonometric function will consolidate the students' understanding about function,train students' mathematical thinking,and even improve students' abilities to solve practical problems.This paper makes a comparative study on the trigonometric function between the textbook A pressed by People's Education Press and the textbook for Hong kong's Seinior students edited by Oxford University Press.It mainly focuses on the comparison on the difficulty between the both textbooks by means of Curriculum Difficulty Model.There are the key research contents and results:1.the comparative study on trigonometric function by means of Pro.Shi Ningzhong's Curriculum Content Difficulty Model shows that there are many differences between the both textbooks.About the school hours,textbook A arranges 32 school hours to study trigonometric function,while there are only 25 school hours in the Oxford edition.About the scope of knowledge,it is much wider in the textbook A than in the Oxford edition.About the depth of knowledge,it is slightly deeper in the Oxford edition than in textbook A.2.Using the Mathematics Comprehensive Difficulty Model carried out in Pro.Bao Jiansheng's article A Comparative Study on the Comprehensive Difficulty between the Mathematics Curriculum in China and UK,it makes a analysis on the exercises based on the five basic factors: exploration,background,operation,inference and knowledge content.It shows that the exploration,background,operation of the exercises in textbook A are greater than those factors in the Oxford edition,but the inference and knowledge content in the Oxford edition are greater than in textbook A.Although the radar charts of the both editions are basically similar,the coefficient of the operation in textbook is much higher than in the Oxford edition.It shows that the capacity of the operation in text A is much higher than in the Oxford edition.According to the coefficient of the inference,it is much higher in the Oxford edition,it shows that the Oxford edition pay more attention to students' inference skills.