The Brazilian Mathematics Textbook Assessment Program and Its Influence on Academic Research

This chapter studies the influence of a textbook assessment program on the academic production of M.Sc and Ph.D. dissertations. Since good textbooks may foster better learning, policies and programs whose aim is the assessment of textbooks contribute indeed to improve education. In Brazil, starting in 1998, the national government set up an assessment program (PNLD—Programa Nacional do Livro e do Material Didático) of elementary, middle and high school textbooks. Publishers sent their textbooks to be assessed in each of PNLD’s assessments. As the end-product of the assessment, a book could be approved for use without reservations, with reservations or be excluded. There was written a long careful review of each textbook; these reviews constituted a catalog, distributed to all public schools in the country, from which teachers had to choose the textbooks they were going to use. The list of non-approved textbooks was not made public.