Türkiye–Yunanistan Matematik Ders Kitaplarının Karşılaştırmalı Analizi: Pisagor Teoremi ve Temellendirilmesi Örneği

Geometry has a significant place within mathematics education beginning from early ages of childhood. It is obvious that comparative analysis results of textbooks, which are the fundamental guides of education, have substantial reflections such as detecting shortcomings and flaws, keeping the education up to date and processing mathematical concepts to make them integrable into education. Greek mathematicians have immense contributions in terms of laying the foundations of geometry. Therefore, including Greek textbooks in the comparative analysis was deemed important. The aim of this study is to compare the subjects of Pythagorean Theorem and how it is grounded between the mathematics textbooks of Turkey and Greece, and to reveal similarities and contrasts. Document analysis as a qualitative research method was applied in the study. Conducting content analysis on textbooks, findings of the comparative analysis of the books were coded and tabulated, and interpreted by combining shared themes. The results of the study revealed that the Greek textbook introduced planar surface areas, surface measurement units and area of plane figures before explaining the Pythagorean Theorem while the theorem itself was clarified by being proven through area formulas. The Turkish textbook, on the other hand, introduced median, altitude, angle bisector, side relationships, angle-side relationships in triangles and drawing triangles. The relationship between side lengths of the given right triangle and surface area of the given square were examined, and the Pythagorean Theorem formula application was displayed through examples. Moreover, in contrast to the textbook of Turkey, the textbook of Greece contained a fair amount of historical information, the converse of the Pythagorean Theorem, and applications and exercises intended for proving the theorem. It was also attention-grabbing that while most of the subjects in the Turkish textbook incorporated the GeoGebra application, no computer application was employed in the textbook of Greece.