Comparing elementary school textbooks of China, Japan, and Malaysia: a praxeological and developmental progression analysis regarding length measurement

This study analyses the instruction and organisation of the measurement domain by comparing textbooks from China, Japan, and Malaysia. Focusing on length measurement, we adopted the use of praxeology from the Anthropological Theory of the Didactics as a framework to reveal the knowledge to be taught in the transposition process, and developmental progression of levels of thinking from Learning Trajectories as a framework to reveal the mental processes or actions generated to achieve the learning goals from the domain. The findings are assembled in three dimensions: types of tasks, accumulation of practice blocks per thinking levels, and instruction sequences. The results indicate that all three countries promote, in different degrees according to their education goals, the development of measurement knowledge by: understanding how to use measurement tools, coordinating the relationship between standard units, and estimating measurements. Lastly, the theoretical framework is proposed as a tool to justify instructional decisions.