AN EXAMINATION OF THE LEVELS OF COGITIVE DEMAND REQUIRED BY PROBABILITY TASKS IN MIDDLE GRADES MATHEMATICS TEXTBOOKS

By Dustin L. Jones, James E. Tarr. Statistics Education Research Journal, 2007

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We analyze probability content within middle grades (6, 7, and 8) mathematics textbooks from a historical perspective. Two series, one popular and the other alternative, from four recent eras of mathematics education (New Math, Back to Basics, Problem Solving, and Standards) were analyzed using the Mathematical Tasks Framework (Stein, Smith, Henningsen, & Silver, 2000). Standards-era textbook series devoted significantly more attention to probability than other series; more than half of all tasks analyzed were located in Standards-era textbooks. More than 85% of tasks for six series required low levels of cognitive demand, whereas the majority of tasks in the alternative series from the Standards era required high levels of cognitive demand. Recommendations for future research are offered. First published November 2007 at Statistics Education Research Journal: Archives

Subfields: Education, Statistics and Probability

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/13db30241e4ab7f5d9d8b909ef89f24fedb5bf77

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Citations in the corpus

Opportunities to Learn Reasoning and Proof in High School Mathematics Textbooks (2012, background): “Senk & Thompson, 2003; Weiss, Knapp, Hollweg, & Burrill, 2001; Woodward & Elliott, 1990). In particular, the National Research Council (2004) calls for content analyses of textbooks to examine the “comprehensiveness of treatment of identified standards .”
Textbook research in mathematics education: development status and directions (2013, background): “A notable earlier study was done by Krammer (1985), who conceptualized the textbook as a classroom context 640 L.”
A Framework for Analyzing Cognitive Demand and Content-Practices Integration: Task Analysis Guide in Science (2015, methodology): “It has served as an analytical tool for researchers to examine the cognitive demand of curricular materials (e.g. Jones & Tarr, 2007; Stein & Kim, 2009; Ubuz, Erbas, Cetinkaya, & Ozgeldi, 2010) and the quality of mathematics instruction (Boston & Smith, 2009; Stein & Kaufman, 2010).”