The Place of Mathematical Proofs in the Middle Grade Mathematics Textbooks

Abstract

The importance of proof in mathematics education has been emphasized by current educational reform suggestions, which explicitly state “mathematical proofs should be an essential part of mathematics classrooms from kindergarten to high school”. Studies, however, demonstrate that classroom textbooks and current educational reform suggestions do not align well. The purpose of this study is to investigate to what extent reasoning-and-proving tasks take place in grade 5-8 mathematics textbooks. For this purpose,
the textbooks suggested by the Ministry of Education to be used in the area of Tokat province have been selected. Selected textbooks were analyzed by at least two coders in two stages. While in the first stage of coding the number of examples, tasks, problems, and practice questions in the textbook were determined; in the second stage the number of reasoning-and-proving tasks were detected. According to the findings of this study, among the total of 2831 tasks analyzed, only 177 (6%) tasks show the characteristics of reasoning-and-proving tasks. Among these reasoning-and-proving tasks, 80 (45%) tasks show non-proof argument characteristics while only 18 (10%) tasks show proof characteristics. These results demonstrate that the number of reasoning-and-proving tasks do not align with the recommendations of current education reforms and mathematics educators.