Reasoning Problems in Current Mathematics Textbooks

Abstract

Reasoning is considered to be a central mathematical skill. In order to acquire this skill, students need to be provided with a rich variety of suitable problems. In mathematics education, such problems are usually part of textbooks. We were therefore interested in the composition of current mathematics textbooks. Our study included two different textbooks for fifth-grade students and two different textbooks for eighth-grade students. We first determined the proportion of reasoning problems in the narrow sense in relation to the total number of problems in the books and then classified them according to the areas of the competence framework for mathematics education. The results of our analyses point to a discrepancy between the demands that are placed on the fostering of this skill and the problems that are actually available.