Word problem solving approaches in mathematics textbooks: a comparison between Singapore and Spain

Singaporean children are the best performers on international achievement tests in mathematics (i.e. the TIMSS). Their excellent results could be due at least partly to certain characteristics of the textbooks used there (Oates2014). Therefore, these materials could be taken as a good benchmark to describe and evaluate aspects of the textbooks of other regions that could be improved. For this reason, the word problem-solving approaches proposed by primary education math textbooks from Spain were compared with those from Singapore based on the presence of the problem-solving steps that are most characteristic of a genuine word problem-solving approach. The results show that the Singaporean textbooks include much more reasoning than the Spanish textbooks, while they include fewer problem-solving steps related to strategies and checking. We conclude that Singaporean textbooks provide better scaffolding for high-quality learning of word problem solving than Spanish textbooks.