The use of textbooks by pre-university teachers: An example with infinite series of real numbers

Alejandro S. González-Martín (1)

1 UdeM - Université de Montréal

Textbooks are central to the teaching process at all levels , including the tertiary level. However, the phenomenon of textbook use in higher education has not been extensively studied. In this paper, we analyse textbook use in the teaching of infinite series of real numbers at the pre-university level in Quebec. We interviewed five teachers about their textbook use in order to investigate similarities between their personal relationship with series and the institutional relationship with series transmitted through textbooks. Our results show that the teachers' courses generally follow the textbook's presentation, and that their documentation system is reduced to almost a single textbook, to which they adhere almost exclusively. We also compare our results with those of Mesa and Griffiths (2012) at the tertiary level.

Mots clés: Textbook use; pre-university; personal relationship; documentation system

Domaines: Education; Histoire et perspectives sur les mathématiques [math.HO]

Alejandro S. González-Martín. The use of textbooks by pre-university teachers: An example with infinite series of real numbers. CERME 9 - Ninth Congress of the European Society for Research in Mathematics Education, Charles University in Prague, Faculty of Education; ERME, Feb 2015, Prague, Czech Republic. pp.2124-2130. ⟨hal-01288592⟩