Analysis of Turkey and Singapore junior high school mathemati̇cs textbooks: Realistic mathematics education perspective

The purpose of this study is to compare the most popular junior high school education mathematics textbook in Turkey with junior high school education mathematics textbook of Singapore in the direction of principles of Realistic Mathematics Education which is a mathematical education approach which has proved its success in the international area. The goal is to explore the principles that form the Realistic Mathematics Education's core, and to look at how these principles are distributed across the book. The data of the study were collected by document analysis and coded according to the basic principles of Realistic Mathematics Education. According to the results of the analysis, the total number of questions in mathematics books representing Turkey and Singapore is 663 and 993, respectively. These questions were examined in 3 categories as sample question, exercise and problem. In the course book representing Turkey, 40% of questions are sample questions, 48% are exercises and 12% are problems. In the book representing Singapore, the sample question is 16%, the exercise is 35% and the problem is 49%. When the questions are examined in terms of the use of realistic situations, 23% of the sample questions, 5% of the exercises and 82% of the problems are realistic in the book representing Turkey. In the book representing Singapore, 70% of the sample questions, 1% of the exercises and 99% of the problems are realistic. Overall, the book that represents Turkey has 21% realistic status, 60% for Singapore. In addition, 50% of the sample questions in the mathematics text book that represents Turkey and 55% of the sample questions in the mathematics text book that represents Singapore were used. The book concludes that students using the book representing Singapore are more active when compared to the sections that require active participation of the students. Some suggestions were presented to increase the permanent learning opportunities of Turkish students. Among these, careful consideration should be given to more realistic problems in mathematics textbooks, modeling activities, and sections that require active participation.