Changes in today´s world bring changes in curriculums, teaching trends and school reforms. Together with the characteristics of the teaching materials´market, it all causes superabundance of teaching materials and along with it the new role for a teacher, now being a person who must choose. Because of the frequent usage of teaching materials at lessons this role is of high importance as it affects the quality of teaching a lot.
The theoretical part of the master´s degree thesis includes the basis of various disciplines which are supposed to help a teacher to choose the quality teaching material for maths lessons though it is his autonomous choice. It is important that his choice reflects his professional knowledge and that it is not a result of a good promotion of new materials. A teacher has to bear in mind the general didactics, t.i. he has to be familiar with the kinds of the teaching materials, he has to check the didactic, stylistic and language principles and the presence of the elements that teach students how to learn. His choice has to relate to the guidelines of the special subject didactics, t.i. the maths didactics and he has to find out whether the materials consider the specifics of the subject and/or modern approaches towards teaching, current curriculum for 5th grade´s maths and whether it contains various tasks according to the types and taxonomic levels of knowledge. In order for the teacher´s choice to be the optimal and not only the quality one he has to be acquainted with the characteristics of the teaching materials´market and its present offer.
Therefore, in the theoretical part we present the current market of printed and electronic teaching materials for 5th grade Maths. Due to the above mentioned professional basis we analysed four current sets of teaching materials for 5th grade Maths, two of which teachers in school year 2016/2017 chose most frequently and the other two most rarely.
The results of the analysis showed that teachers usually choose the appropriate quality teaching materials but not always the most optimal ones. The main imperfections which we came across at were in the following sections: the teaching of how to learn, considering the characteristics of Maths and the variety of different tasks. The highest level of matching with the theoretical issues was found in the uniformity with the curriculum, the adequacy of language and style as well as in the considering the personal guidelines of a teacher and the didactic principles. Although the analysed sets didn´t differ much according to the quality of the materials they differed a lot according to the presence of the individual criterion. Most differences appear in the criteria related to the teacher´s personal trends, the formation and the specifics of Maths. Exactly because of that, it is important that a teacher considers seriously about advantages and disadvantages and chooses quality teaching materials for his work which are in line with his own teaching style. To help him choose soundly and responsibly he can use a guide, Model za presojanje kakovosti učnih gradiv za pouk matematike v osnovni šoli, which we had created for the purpose of our research and updated later on the basis of the findings. As it is founded on the theoretical backgrounds of general and specific didactics and can be applied also as the tool of evaluating quality of teaching materials of all grades we assess it as our main scientifical contribution to the discipline.
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