The use of problem in upper-primary and lower-secondary textbooks of the Republic of Cyprus

International audienceResearch suggests that transitions from primary to secondary education typically have negative influences on pupils’ mathematical performance, motivation, and self-efficacy. In acknowledgement of these issues, I examine how the term ‘problem’ is used in the upper-primary and lower-secondary national maths textbooks in the Republic of Cyprus, in an attempt to explore the coherence between the instructional materials pupils are exposed to in the two school levels. More specifically, all tasks explicitly labelled as ‘problems’ in the two textbook series were identified. For analysing the tasks, an adapted version of Borasi’s (1986) framework about the structural characteristics of problems was utilised. Findings conclude that coherence between the two textbook series is limited, as in the primary series the term ‘problem’ is extensively used in a particular way, while in the secondary series, a significant decline of the number of tasks labelled as problems is observed