• Journal of Educational Research in Mathematics
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• v.19 no.1
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• pp.25-43
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• 2009

The fraction concept consists of various meanings and is one of the abstract and difficult in elementary school mathematics. This study intends to find out the implication for introducing the fraction concept by comparing mathematics textbooks of Korea and Singapore. Both countries' students peformed well in recent TIMMSs. Some implications are as follows; The term 'equal' is not defined and the results of various 'equal partitioning' activities can not easily examined in Korea's mathematics textbook. And contexts of introducing fractions as a quotient and a ratio are unnatural in Korea's mathematics textbook in comparison with Singapore's mathematics textbook. So these ideas should be reconsidered in order to seek the direction for improvement of it. And Korea's textbooks need the emphasis on the fraction as a measure and on constructing fraction concept by unit fraction.

• Communications of Mathematical Education
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• v.33 no.3
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• pp.335-354
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• 2019

The purpose of this study is to explore alternative ways of teaching derivatives in a way that emphasizes intuition. For this purpose, the contents related to derivatives in Korean curriculum and textbooks were analyzed by comparing with contents in Singapore Curriculum and textbooks. Singapore, where the curriculum deals with derivatives relatively earlier than Korea, introduces the concept of derivatives and differentiation as the slope of tangent instead of the rate of instantaneous change in textbook. Also, Singapore use technology and inductive extrapolation to emphasize intuition rather than form and logic. Further, from the results of the exploration of other foreign cases, we confirm that the UK and Australia also emphasized intuition in teaching derivatives and differentiation. Based on the results, we discuss the meaning and implication of introducing derivatives and teaching differentiation in a way that emphasizes intuition. Finally, we propose the implications for the alternative way of teaching differentiation.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.12 no.4
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• pp.139-157
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• 2006

As the Communicative Approach has become the norm in foreign language teaching, the objectives of teaching English in school have changed radically in Korea. The focus in high school English textbooks has shifted from mere mastery of structures to communicative proficiency. This paper will study five polysemous words which appear in twelve high school English textbooks used in Korea. The twelve text books are incorporated into a single corpus and analyzed to classify the usage of the selected words. Then the usage of each word was compared with that of three other corpora based sources: the BNC(British National Corpus) Sampler, ICE Singapore(International Corpus of English for Singapore) and Collins COBUILD learner's dictionary which is based on the corpus, "The Bank of English". The comparisons carried out as part of this study will demonstrate that Korean text books do not always supply the full range of meanings of polysemous words.

• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Intelligent Systems Conference
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• 2003.09a
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• pp.508-512
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• 2003

In 2000, the economy of Asia made a V-character type recovery from the currency and financial crisis in 1997. The increase in exports is assumed to be one of the causes. To negotiate with foreign countries, English must be indispensable in many cases. In this study, we investigated how English education is performed in East Asian countries while focusing on English textbooks. We metrically analyzed some textbooks used junior high schools and high school in Japan and Korea, and elementary schools in China and Singapore to compare them with U.S.A and U.K textbook. We investigated some characteristics of character-and word-appearance of English textbook using an exponential function. Moreover we derived the degree of difficulty far each material through the variety of words and their frequency on the basis of the required English vocabulary in Japanese junior high schools. As a result we could show at which level of U.S.A. or U.K the English textbooks used in East Asian countries are.

• Education of Primary School Mathematics
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• v.25 no.3
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• pp.251-278
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• 2022

The purpose of this study is to obtain implications for mathematical education by analyzing how the multiplication and division of decimal numbers are presented in the elementary mathematics textbooks in Korea, Japan, Singapore, and Finland. Compared to the fact that students often have misconceptions about multiplication and division of decimal numbers, there have been not many comparative studies in recent elementary mathematics textbooks. For this study, we selected elementary mathematics textbooks those are widely used in Japan, Singapore, and Finland along with Korean elementary mathematics textbooks. We chose the textbooks because the students in the selected countries have scored high in international achievement studies such as TIMSS and PISA. The analysis was examined in terms of elementary mathematics curriculum related to multiplication and division of decimal numbers, introduction and content, real-life situations, use of visual models, and formalization methods of algorithms. As a result of the study, the mathematics curricula related to multiplication and division of decimal numbers includes estimation in Korea and Finland, while Japan and Singapore emphasize real-life connections more, and Finland completes the operations in secondary schools. The introduction and content are intensively provided in a short period of time or distributed in various grades and semesters. The real-life situations are presented in a simple sentence format in all countries, and the use of visual models or formalization of algorithms is linked to the operations of natural numbers in unit conversions. Suggestions were made for textbook development and teacher training programs.

• Journal of Educational Research in Mathematics
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• v.26 no.3
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• pp.443-465
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• 2016

The study aims to compare our newest mathematics curriculum with Singapore's and analyse the differences of them. Because the levels of our mathematics education have been evaluated to be difficult to our students, we try to find that the evaluation is appropriate and there are other characteristics we have to notice carefully, and provide some implications for our mathematics curriculum. We mainly compared both mathematics curriculums focussed on the national documents of mathematics curriculum, and textbooks in the level of middle school. The results are following. Firstly, Singapore has three tracks based on students' abilities and there are three kinds of textbooks on the tracks. This is a different from our teaching on students level. Secondly, the introductions of our mathematics curriculum contents are not faster than Singapore's, but they have more concrete ranges of contents than us. Thirdly, the focus of Singapore's mathematics education lies on problem solving, and we can find some good examples of contents of textbook focussed on problem solving. Some mathematical concepts are introduced simply without any process of students discoveries or investigations, and the focus lies on the problem solving using the concepts. Fourthly, Singapore's mathematics textbooks are more emphasis on the internal connections than ours.

• Journal of Science Education
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• v.36 no.1
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• pp.139-152
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• 2012

The purpose of this study is to provide some suggestions for future improvement of scientific inquiry activities in Korean elementary science textbook. The modified framework of Lee(2005) and Millar et al.(1998) was used to compare inquiry activities in the Korean and Singaporean science textbooks. The results of this study are as follows: Korean text books have more activities than Singapore's, but both countries have similar time allotment for science classes. In the area of 'inquiry process skill', Singapore is more balanced in 'Basic inquiry process skills' and 'Integrated inquiry process skills' than Korea. Singapore's integrated inquiry rate is also higher than Korea's. Next the results of comparing leaning objectives to scientific inquiry activities shows that Korean text books tend to focus on 'contents objectives', while Singapore's text books focus on balancing 'contents objectives' and 'process objectives'. Korean science textbooks encourage students to communicate the results of experiments but in most case these communication activities are actually not performed. Lastly Korea and Singapore have low degree of openness in inquiry activities. Remarkably 'Suggest questions' are totally conducted by teachers. This study implies that Korean science textbooks should have lower amounts of inquiry activities to accomodate enough time for communication about results. Next we need to make balance not only 'Basic inquiry process skills' and 'Integrated inquiry process skills' but also 'Content objectives' and 'Process objectives'. Lastly we need to make student to be the leader in science classes through encouraging them to plan procedures for experiments and to discover results by themselves.

• Journal of Elementary Mathematics Education in Korea
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• v.22 no.4
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• pp.453-473
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• 2018

In this study, we analyzed the contents of speed concept presented in Korean, Japanese, Singapore, and American elementary mathematics textbooks, and drew implications for the teaching of speed concept in elementary schools. We developed a textbook analysis framework by theoretical discussions on the characteristics of the speed concept based on the proportional relationship and the previous researches on the speed in elementary mathematics. We analyzed the textbooks of four countries and drew some suggestions for improving the teaching of speed concept in Korean elementary schools.

• School Mathematics
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• v.18 no.2
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• pp.375-396
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• 2016

This study considered Elementary school textbook and teacher's manual in Korea in terms of theories on counting. First we considered the meaning of counting in elementary school mathematics based on many preceding researches. And we compared textbooks in Korea with foreign textbooks in Singapore, China, USA. As a result, compared with Korea, these foreign textbooks reflect the theories on counting more actively. First of all, they consider counting to be an important basis for the four operations. Teacher's manual in Korea introduces the theories on counting, but the content was limited and thread was not clear. Based on these consideration, We discussed reflection of elementary school textbook in terms of theories on counting.

• Communications of Mathematical Education
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• v.35 no.4
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• pp.505-525
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• 2021

In this study, we investigated how multiplication by 2-digit numbers had been taught in elementary mathematics textbooks of Korea, Japan, Singapore, and USA. As a result of analysis, we found as follows. Korean textbooks do not teach the multiplication by 10 and the multiplication by power of 10, but Japanese, Singapore, and US textbooks explicitly teach related content. In the '×tens' teaching, Japanese and American textbooks teach formally the law of association of multiplication applied in the process of calculating the partial product of multiplication. The standard multiplication algorithm generally followed a standard method of recording partial product result according to the law of distribution, but the differences were confirmed in the multiplication model, the teaching method of the law of distribution, and the notation of the last digit '0'. Based upon these results, we suggested some proposals for improving the multiplication teaching.