A New and Realistic Approach to Contextualize the Mathematical Learning

Abstract

The school textbook was always considered as a fundamental component in teaching and learning mathematics (Reys et al., 2004; Fan et al. 2013), but also as an indicator of the quality of building up a student's knowledge. Several studies (Delcroix et al., 2013; Tang et al., 2010) justify the lack of motivation of students to learn mathematics by the absence of contextualization in the didactic situations proposed by these manuals: this absence leads to poor understanding of the practical significance of the mathematical knowledge offered by these textbooks. It is therefore necessary to write textbooks using approaches that promote active and interactive learning, as well as creativity and critical thinking among students, in other words helping students to develop different mathematical thinking. In this paper, we are mainly interested in the contribution of school textbooks to the development of the algebraic thinking among students, especially when that books use a new and realistic approach to contextualize the mathematical learning, the so-called “Realistic Mathematics Education” (RME).