Examination of secondary school textbooks from Turkey, Singapore, and Canada in the context of proportional thinking

The aim of this study is to examine and compare the extent to which learning opportunities are aligned with the development of proportional thinking skills in the 5th, 6th, 7th and 8th grade mathematics textbooks of Turkey, Singapore, and Canada. For this purpose, all questions in the ratio and proportion units were analysed in two dimensions as sequence and content. In order to examine how the textbooks deal with proportional thinking developmentally, proportional thinking levels and indicators were determined. With the help of indicators, the way in which textbooks presented proportional thinking developmentally was examined. The questions examined within the content were evaluated in terms of the knowledge dimension and the cognitive process dimension. In this context, the levels were evaluated according to the procedural and conceptual knowledge in the knowledge dimension and the revised Bloom's taxonomy in the cognitive process dimension. As a result of the study, it has been determined that no country has dealt with proportional thinking skill levels in a complete sequence. In addition, it has been concluded that the Singapore textbooks deal with proportional thinking in the most comprehensive way according to the indicators of the levels. It has been determined that in the content dimension, all textbooks mainly provide procedural knowledge and in the cognitive dimension, low-level cognitive processes are mostly provided. On completion of the study, it was concluded that textbooks still have deficiencies in creating content based on student developmental learning in terms of proportional reasoning.