The Trends and Highlights of Mathematics Textbook Research in Korea via Topic Modelling

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to analyze the overall trends of mathematics textbook research in Korea. For this purpose, we collected 455 research articles on mathematics textbooks from all the articles published in seven domestic professional journals of mathematics education. We used topic modelling based on latent Dirichlet allocation algorithms to extract topics that reflected not only overall trends but also the trends by each curriculum revision period, including the top 10 words and three representative papers that best indicated each topic. The most frequent topic that appeared across almost all curriculum periods was concept and term, which focused on specific concepts and their definitions, examples, and representations used in textbooks. Another topic, comparing textbooks, was also popular, recently including more foreign textbooks. Topics such as storytelling and mathematical competency were emergent in a specific curriculum period, indicating the close relationship between textbook research and curriculum revisions. Based on these findings, this paper concludes by sharing several implications for future mathematics textbook research in Korea, discussing which topics continue to be studied and in what directions, as well as which topics need to expanded and why.