Investigation of the contexts of mathematics problems in primary school 3rd grade mathematics textbooks

The aim of this study is to examine the contexts of the mathematics problems existing in the Primary School Mathematics 3rd Grade Textbooks, which was published by the Turkish Ministry of Education Publications in the academic year of 2018-2019. In this research, the mathematics problems in the textbook were investigated by using descriptive analysis techniques with respect to several dimensions of problem context such as the place and time of the problem, the number and the characteristics of people, objects and tools existing in the problem and the psychometric properties of the problem (difficulty level, solution strategy and desired operations etc.). The findings of the study show that most of the existing problems in the mathematics textbook score poorly with different dimensions of problem context and they do not have a meaningful real-life context. In addition, it was found that authentic non-routine problems were given less space. It was concluded that more realistic problem context should be used in mathematics problems in order to get rid of mathematical anxiety of the children and encourage positive feelings towards mathematics and motivate students to solve mathematics problems.