Javier Claros Mellado
Mª Teresa Sánchez Compaña
Moisés Coriat Benarroch
Abstract:We describe a study of Spanish mathematics text books (secondary level) that allowed us to develop, in part, the field work in two doctoral theses. It’s an experimental study in which an intentional sample, with a total of 40 textbooks, was used to search for, separately, the development made by the respective authors in regard to the finite limit of a sequence (Claros, 2010, doctoral
thesis) and the finite limit of a function at a point (Sánchez, 2012, doctoral thesis). From our theoretical framework (phenomenology of limit), we describe the phenomena that we looked for in the textbooks sample. This has been done following a systematic method to analyze each book, we also include a description of such a method. We summarize the results obtained, by integrating them into useful time ranges for the literature in Spanish, and indicate some pathways for the future of our research.
Key words: textbooks, limits, phenomena, function, sequence.
