Chapter 11: Survey and Analysis on the Usage of the New Primary School Mathematics Textbooks

In the turn of the century China launched a school curriculum reform, and the new primary mathematics textbooks as per the National Mathematics Curriculum Standards for Compulsory Education (Experimental) (MOE of PRC, 2001) have been put into use in 2001, starting from certain experimental districts and then popularized to the whole country. In 2011, the Ministry of Education promulgated a revised version of the standards, the National Mathematics Curriculum Standards for Compulsory Education (2011 Edition) (MOE of PRC, 2012), and then the textbooks revised according to the 2011 standards have entered the school classrooms since 2013.

What happens to students since this round of curriculum reform? This question is concerned not only by the policy makers, reform designers, and school teachers, but also by the parents, and even by the whole society.

This chapter reports an investigation we carried out in 2011 on pupils’ academic ability in mathematics in the certain experimental districts. Compared with the West, Japan shares more similarities with China in mathematics education, such as the school system, curriculum contents, etc. Therefore, we selected the mathematical test papers for grade 6 of the “2010 National Survey of Academic Level in Japan”, in which the examined contents and questions are more in line with the learning process and cognitive development levels of Chinese pupils. It is hoped that the assessment of the pupils’ mathematics learning quality could reflect the effectiveness of the new textbooks used in the experimental districts.