„Multiplication table, at last!“ – Teaching of multiplication in Croatia

The content analysis of Croatian mathematics textbooks for primary education indicates that in Croatia the initial learning of concepts and skills related to multiplication relies heavily on practice. At the same time, students are not provided with greater support in the form of various strategies and representations that can facilitate their learning. Therefore, it is to be expected that students will largely experience multiplication and the multiplication table as something that simply needs to be learned by heart (Baković, Trupčević, & Valent, 2019).
Textbooks as educational artifacts approved by state bodies responsible for education policy form an important element of the subject curriculum and have a significant impact on teaching practice (Haggarty & Pepin, 2002; Glasnović Gracin & Jukić Matić, 2016). But as learning and teaching represent a complex system, to get a fuller picture it is also necessary to look at how teaching of multiplication looks in practice itself.
For the purposes of the research it was arranged with 6 teachers of 2nd grade of primary school from Zagreb and Petrinja, two cities from central Croatia, to observe their teaching of multiplication in their classes. For the analysis of observed classes, a framework from Charalambous, Delaney, Hsu, and Mesa (2010) was adapted, as it was done in the previous textbook analysis. The research plan envisaged observation of 3 teaching hours per teacher, but as classes ceased to be held live in early March due to the Covid-19 pandemic, only one teaching hour per teacher was observed. The data obtained in this way were compared with the data obtained from the analysis of the relevant textbooks used by the teachers.
In this presentation, we present the results of this incomplete research, believing that they can serve as motivation for new research in the near or distant future.