Teachers’ and Students’ Views on the Readability and Comprehensibility of Texts in Secondary School Mathematics Textbooks

It is not only the student s responsibility to understand a text. Whether or not the texts presented to students are prepared in accordance with their level directly affect the comprehensibility of the text. Many formulas have been developed to measure the readability of texts. The sentence length is one of the important variables in the readability formulas. The case study method was used in this study and 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th grade mathematics textbooks which were published by private publishers and approved by Ministry of National Education in 2017-2018 academic year were analyzed. In this context, the relationship between the readability scores of the texts at the level of knowledge, questions and solutions in the middle school mathematics textbooks and the comprehensibility of these texts were investigated. In this regard, the views of 18 mathematics teachers and 181 students at the 5th, 6th, 7th and 8th grades were taken on the comprehensibility of low, medium and high readability of knowledge texts, questions and solution texts. The students generally found the texts to be readable at a level that would not obstruct the understanding, and the teachers found it to be easily understandable. On the other hand, the students generally found the texts to be understandable at the medium and good level and generally understandable. Results showed that, teachers, except for the structure of the text in the middle school textbooks, want to; be increased the number of the daily life problems; be reduced the use of intensive symbols, and be increased the problems that are appropriate for their age and experience. Moreover, the students, except for the structure of the text in the middle school textbooks, want to be used multiple representations.