Values in the geometry and measurement unit of the Palestinian Grade six mathematics book

Abstract

ABSTRACT School textbooks affect the different aspects of students’ learning. One way that textbooks can affect students’ learning is through the values embedded in the texts. In the present research, we intend to study values in elementary school mathematics textbook. Specifically, we study values in the Geometry and Measurement unit of the Palestinian Grade six mathematics book. This unit is comprised of five lessons. To analyse the unit, we use a classification model suggested by Sam and Ernest. In this model, Sam and Ernest consider values in mathematics education as consisting of three categories: epistemological, social and personal values. Analysing the unit, we found that the epistemological component was the most frequent in the unit, while the second was the personal component and the third was the social. Alertness in thought, discriminating and rationality had the highest percentages as epistemological values, importance had the highest percentage as a social value and open-mindedness had the highest percentage as a personal value. Correlations between pairs of values in each component showed two significant strong positive correlations, while the other significant correlations were relatively strong or moderate. Further research needs to study correlations between pairs of values, and how these pairs affect students’ learning.