EXAMINATION OF MATHEMATICS TEXTBOOKS IN USE IN HUNGARIAN PRIMARY SCHOOLS IN ROMANIA

A good textbook must meet a number of pedagogical, psychological, scientific, esthetical, and other requirements. The presented research examines whether the mathematics textbooks in use in Hungarian primary schools in Romania meet those requirements. We used documentation, contents analysis and surveys as research methods. We examined the mathematics textbooks against requirements in appearance, style and language, editing, approach and contents material. Following contents analysis we can state as a positive result that the textbooks provide a great variety of problem solving tasks, while meeting the principle of progressivity. Nevertheless, they contain mathematical mistakes, scientific inaccuracies, are not in total agreement with the curriculum and their language is inappropriate. These findings are supported by the results of our survey. The hundred and two teachers asked in the survey gave a medium qualification to the primary school mathematics textbooks. The most often quoted flaws are the lack of differentiated, layered and task based teaching material, as well as the inappropriate language owed to bad translation of the textbooks originally written in Romanian.