Chapter 7: Comparison of Difficulty Levels of Examples in High School Mathematics Textbooks

Examples in mathematics textbooks play a multi-functional role in mathematics teaching and learning, and the difficulty of examples reflects the difficulty of mathematics textbooks. With six series of high school mathematics textbooks from China, the United States, France, Russia, and Australia as samples, this chapter uses a composite difficulty model to analyze the difficulty levels of examples in the textbooks with respect to 5 factors — the problem context, the mathematical cognition, the computation complexity, the reasoning difficulty, and the topic coverage. The results compare difficulty characteristic of examples in the sample textbooks, which may provide references for the textbook compilation in China.