The mathematics approaches in the analysis of mathematics syllabuses similarities among Japanese and Bosnia and Herzegovina universities

Abstract

The goal of our research is improvement of mathematics curriculum and popularization of mathematics among students of economics in developing countries. We analyze and compare curricula of pure mathematics courses that are taught to university students of faculties of economics in Japan and in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Data set contains math syllabuses in 2021/22 school year from six public universities in Bosnia and Herzegovina and seven from Japan. The text corpus was pre-processed and then the Term Frequency – Inverse Document Frequency algorithm, and Sentence Transformed Multi QA model were applied to build word vectors, find the similarity among Japanese and Bosnia and Herzegovina mathematics syllabuses using cosine similarity approach, and to find the key competences of these two countries mathematics syllabuses using the word cloud. Our results show the following similarity between the curricula: 60.7 percent using TF-IDF and 80.3 percent using Multi QA model. The key competences in the Japanese mathematics course are narrow and focused, in contrast to Bosnia and Herzegovina’s.