Explain this
Mathematics Curriculum in Pacific Rim Countries
How the publisher describes it:
“A volume in Research in Mathematics Education Series Editor Barbara J. Dougherty, University of Mississippi This volume contains the proceedings of the First International Curriculum Conference sponsored by the Center for the Study of Mathematics Curriculum (CSMC). The CSMC is one of the National Science Foundation Centers for Learning and Teaching (Award No. ESI-0333879). The countries-China, Japan, Korea, and Singapore (in alphabetical order, which also happens to be the order of their populations)-have each been in the news because of their performance on international tests and/or their economic performance and potential. They also have centralized education ministries that create a single mathematics curriculum framework followed in the entire country.”
Review by Matthew Reames
In brief:
This book is an interesting look the development of mathematics curricula and textbooks in four different Pacific Rim countries. Also included are views of the mathematics curricula and textbooks from the perspective of American academics.
“An insight into how the national maths curricula and textbooks are developed in four Asian countries”
The focus of Mathematics Curriculum in Pacific Rim Countries is on the development of the national guidelines, frameworks and textbooks in four Asian nations. As stated by the editor, ‘Learning what is done in other countries brings perspective to what we do in our country.’
This book is is a series of papers presented at the First International Curriculum Conference at the University of Chicago in 2005. The focus was on the mathematics curriculum of four countries — China, Japan, Korea, and Singapore — were chosen because of their performance on international tests or their economic performance. The book contains two papers from an expert in each country, one paper about curriculum development and the other paper about the writing of textbooks for that country. An additional eight papers are from researchers in the United States who compared curriculum in the US to one of those countries. A further four papers focus on the status of calculator use in the US curriculum and on the role of testing in the US curriculum. Following the conference, two more papers were written by conference attendees as reflections of the earlier papers.
The papers in this book provide quite a few interesting things to think about. For me, the two most surprising things about Korea, for example, were the fact that over a thousand years ago, in 958, people wanting to become government officials had to pass a maths exam, and that in the year 2000, Korean parents spent more money on out-of-school tuition for their children than the government spent on education (including college tuition). Additionally, the paper titled ‘Innovations Bringing Degeneration’ has some interesting warnings from Japan regarding the declines in National Standards following repeated curriculum revisions
Of further interest to me were the papers that examined specific textbook examples from each country. Though mathematics is often seen as universal, the ways in which the material is presented can very widely from country to country and from culture to culture. There is an excellent paper regarding maths textbooks in Singapore and the paper addresses several misconceptions as well as compares aspects of US curriculum with that of Singapore.
Mathematics Curriculum in Pacific Rim Countries will probably appeal primarily to those whose main work is curriculum development. There is also quite a bit of comparison to education in the United States, which, though not directly analogous to the education systems in the UK, also provides more interesting points to ponder. I would imagine that a similar paper about the development of national mathematics curricula and textbooks in the UK would prove to be fascinating reading.
Matthew Reames • Former Head of Mathematics, St Edmund's Junior School, Canterbury, now PhD student in mathematics education at the University of Virginia
Paperback: 376 pages
Publisher: Information Age Publishing (1 Sep 2008)
Language English
ISBN-10: 9781593119539
ISBN-13: 978-1593119539
ASIN: 1593119534
Product Dimensions: 23.1 x 15.5 x 2.5 cm
