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Measures of association, which typically require pairwise data, are widespread in many aspects of educational research. However, due to the need to reduce their content to equal numbers of units of analysis, they are rarely found in the analysis of textbooks. In this paper, we present two methods for overcoming this limitation, one through the use of disjoint sections and the other through the use of overlapping moving averages. Both methods preserve the temporal structure of data and enable researchers to calculate a measure of association which, in this case, is the complementary Euclidean average distance, as an indicator of the books' similarity. We illustrate these approaches by means of a comparative analysis of three commonly-used English and Swedish mathematics textbooks. Analyses were focused on individual tasks, which had all been coded according to the presence or absence of particular characteristics. Both methods produce nearly identical results and are robust with respect to both densely and sparsely occurring characteristics. For both methods, widening the aggregation window results in a slightly increased level of quantified similarity, which is the result of the 'smoothing effect'. We discuss the relation between the window width and the choice of research question. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we approach modelling mathematics dispositions from a different methodological perspective in order to shed more light into the complex interplay between teaching practices and students' learning outcomes. We draw on survey data from around 5000 students from Year 7–11 (age 11–16) from 40 Secondary schools in England. Our methodological approach includes Rasch modelling to produce measures of attitudinal outcomes as well as students' perceptions of pedagogic practices. We then employ fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fs/QCA) to explore the relationships between students' characteristics and the perceived type of teaching they receive in mathematics. We use two measures of 'transmissionist teaching' which aim to quantify the degree to which teaching practices are perceived as 'teacher-centred'. One measure gives the students' perceptions and the other gives the teacher's perspective. We find that different configurations of student and teacher perceptions of transmissionist teaching are associated with high and low mathematical dispositions for different year groups and for boys and girls. We discuss the methodological merits of this approach along with the substantive educational implications of these findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]