Textbook Research as Scientific Research: Towards a Common Ground for Research on Mathematics Textbooks

This article explores research issues and methods of textbook research. Drawing on literatures and the author’s own work in the area of mathematics textbook research, it conceptualizes textbooks as an intermediate variable in the context of education and hence defines textbook research as disciplined inquiry into issues about textbooks and the relationships between textbooks and other factors in education. Furthermore, it argues that to further advance the field of textbook research, researchers need to expand research issues from descriptive issues focusing on what textbooks are to correlational and especially causal issues including why the textbooks are and how textbooks function in the context of education, and for this purpose, researchers must go beyond textbook analysis, comparison and use to employ more empirically-based and particularly experimental method and view more rigorously textbook research as scientific research