The Introduction of Proof at the Secondary School in Cameroun: A First Approach trough the Study of Quadrilaterals and Triangles in the Textbook

The purpose of this article is to better understand how proof is introduced into the study of quadrilaterals and triangles in high school. To do this, we designed a grid to analyse mathematics textbooks in Cameroon francophone subsystems (7th Grade and 8th Grade). The Anthropological Theory of Didactics and the paradigms in geometry served as a theoretical framework for our analyses. The results of our analysis indicate that problems in the lessons section correspond to guided problems. These kinds of problems do not develop students’ spirit of research and initiative. The authors of the textbook choose to teach the functioning of deductive reasoning in the 8th Grade. They choose to introduce proof in the commented exercise section rather than lessons section. The learning problems proposed in the textbooks contain drawings wish have informative function and representative function. The preponderance of drawings with a representative function that have the same shape and name observed in textbooks can contribute to the construction of constant visual models in students’ minds. This could lead to the superficial use of drawings in proof tasks.