2022 Volume 46 Issue 4 Pages 321-332
Discussions on the connection between elementary school mathematics and lower secondary school mathematics in Japan have been conducted for many years. However, this has been confined to local discussions on the connection between the same domains, and there has been no global discussion on the connection between elementary school mathematics itself and lower secondary school mathematics itself. Therefore, the objective of this study is to clarify the similarities and differences between them.
To achieve this, we analysed mathematics textbooks from the perspective of semiotics. The results of a quantitative analysis show that there were almost no descriptive models using all three meta-languages in all grades, and that the proportion of descriptive models using at least meta-language with object-referential property was high in all grades. On the other hand, the proportion of descriptive models with figurative representation and expressive representation was lower in grade 5 than in grade 6 and onwards. The results of the qualitative analysis show that the data-driven domain was not connected to other domains in all grades, while there was a difference in that the number of nested models was three up to grade 6, but two from grade 1 in lower secondary school.
