Evaluating the context-based problems of the fourth grade primary school math textbook and comparing it with the international studies

The present study examined the context-based problems of the fourth grade primary school math textbook and also compared it with the latest published problems of the TIMSS 2015. This evaluation has been based on the degree of relevance of the context-based problems to the real world with the help of frameworks proposed in the related researches and the content area of the problems. It was a descriptive-analytical-comparative research, for which the proposed Brady model has been used. The research tool was the checklists whose face and content validity have been confirmed by experts and their reliability have been computed using the Holsti formula (0.88). The results showed that in the fourth grade math textbook, 83.89% of the problems are standard application and 16.11% are context separate, and these values for the TIMSS context-based problems are about 84% and 16%, respectively, which indicates the similarity of the distribution of these problems. In terms of content, the frequency of context-based problems is the same between the two sources, however the observed ratio among the content domains in the textbook is unbalanced. About half of the context-based problems of the TIMSS studies have a very similar example in the textbook, and the other half have the same content, but a different or slightly more complex solution method, and a few number of these problems have not been similar to the ones in the textbook. However, the students' performance in solving TIMSS study's context-based problems was lower than the international mean. The results of this research could help the educational planners in identifying the positive and negative points of textbooks.