Abstract:

The Lithuanian state general mathematics education program for primary school (2008) emphasises the development of students' mathematics competence in primary classes as the one of the most important tasks of teaching mathematics. In this paper, mathematics competence is defined as a combination of subject knowledge, mathematical communication, mathematical thinking, and problem-solving abilities, and attitudes to learn mathematics. By educating students, primary school teachers use a variety of teaching materials: school textbooks are no longer the only one source, but it is still important, and state schools use it in the teaching process. In the preparation of the textbooks, the authors seek to implement the requirements of the education program and to comply with the national textbooks evaluation criteria. These pedagogical, psychological and subject criteria are related to the textbook subject content and applied pedagogy. In our research, we sought to assess the possibilities of the five different series of mathematics textbooks to develop students' mathematics abilities. The study included three groups of prospective teachers studying under different primary school teacher education programs (full-time, part-time, and retraining). The results of the study showed that the evaluation of the textbooks done by the three groups of pre-service primary school teacher was similar. The possibilities of different series of textbooks to develop students' mathematics abilities were observed, their strengths and weaknesses emerged.

Keywords:

Mathematics abilities, mathematics textbook, primary school, pre-service teacher.