OpenUCT :: Browsing by Author "Harris, Carol"

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Errors in South African secondary school mathematics textbooks
(1998) Harris, Carol; Webb, John
Since 1960 various new topics were introduced into the South African mathematics syllabus for high schools. This was generally described as "New Maths". These topics were characterised by an emphasis on mathematical structure (set theory, groups, rings and fields, the construction of the real number system, relations and functions, vectors and mathematical induction). Textbooks that were published in South Africa during this time have been found to contain numerous significant mathematical errors, especially in connection with these new topics. This project has entailed the collection, classification and commentary on these problems. It has involved a study of a range of texts from Standards 6 to 10. The methodology utilised entailed reading as many maths textbooks as we could find in libraries such as Education libraries. Other sources of textbooks were from the library of the Mathematics Education Project (MEP)(of the University of Cape Town), private collections and second hand bookshops. Some misconceptions arise across a range of texts indicating that either a general misunderstanding has occurred or that authors have used one another's work in their research. We conducted a search for mathematical errors and not minor misprints, arithmetical slips, algebraic errors, mistakes in answers at the back of the book, spelling or grammatical mistakes.