Analyzing of mathematical tasks of eighth grades' maths course books according to cognitive demands: Numbers and operations learning domain

The aim of this study is to analyze the cognitive levels of mathematical tasks in the domain of learning numbers and operations of eighth grade mathematics course books. For this purpose, according to the 2018 secondary school mathematics course curriculum, two different eighth grade mathematics course books that are proposed to be taught for five years as of 2019 have been considered by the decision of the Ministry of National Education and the Training Education Board. The mathematical tasks in the field of learning numbers and operations in these books, one of which was prepared by the Ministry of National Education (A) and the other by a private publishing house (B), have been divided into four task types, primarily preparation, solution, practice and evaluation. Subsequently, all of the tasks in the preparation, exercise and evaluation types have been analyzed according to the cognitive demand levels proposed by Smith and Stein (1998). As a result of the study, it was found that more than half of the tasks in the books had a low level of cognitive demand, and the cognitive demand levels of the tasks in book A were higher than in book B. Besides, it was found that there were no tasks at the memorization level in preparation-type tasks, while there were no tasks at the doing mathematics level in practice-type tasks.