Comparative Study of Elementary School Mathematics Textbooks between Singapore and Indonesia: The Case of Fractions

Abstract

Background : Mathematics textbooks are one of the tools that link the expected goals of the mathematics curriculum and its practice in mathematics classes. Thus, reviewing mathematics textbooks between countries is one way to reflect and improve based on good practice. Objectives : To examine the structure and order of contents presented in Indonesian and Singaporean mathematics textbooks, as well as the differences between the two. Design : This research uses textbook comparison study and focuses on how mathematical tasks are presented. The two textbooks compared are Senang Belajar Matematika (Indonesia) and My Pals Are Here (Singapore). Data collection and analysis : We analyzed it by conducting coding based on the adaptation of Gracin’s framework which includes five dimensions of analysis: content, mathematical activity, level of complexity, answer form, and contextual features. The validated coding results are used to report research results. Results : Some aspects of competence for each textbook tend to have the same proportions. In the mathematical activity aspect, both provide operation and calculation activities that are more dominant than the others. However, Singaporean mathematics textbooks offer more opportunities for argumentation and reasoning, and interpretation activities, which interpretation activities are not available in Indonesian mathematics textbooks. We also found that both textbooks offer a variety of task activity types, with the Indonesian textbook offering more types. Conclusions : The two textbooks' structure and order of content are significantly different, with the distribution of the number of tasks for each dimension being more even in Singaporean textbook.