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A three-day MUST workshop with mathematics textbook developers for Grades 11 and 12 was conducted from May 06 - 08, 2022 in Addis Ababa. Participants were 9 textbook developers from Addis Ababa, Jimma, Hawasa and Bahir Dar University and one mathematics expert from The Ministry of Education of Ethiopia (MoE).

The MUST team is in charge of quality assurance of secondary mathematics textbooks. The team is struggling with two issues regarding the draft version of the textbooks. One is that units are not structured in a way that students can immediately exercise what they just learned in the class. The lack of immediate exercises clearly makes it difficult for students to understand new concepts or acquire new skills introduced in the lesson. To overcome this problem, MUST Japanese experts have proposed the standard structure of "A (Activity) -D (Definition) -E (Example) -E (Exercise)" be applied to each lesson. The second issue is that problems given as Examples and Exercises are too difficult for most of the students. MUST Japanese experts have proposed making the problems basic and simple so that students can learn the mathematical concepts easily. They have termed these two adjustments "unitization" and "modifications of problems".

The objectives of the workshop were "to work on ‘unitization' and ‘modifications of problems', incorporating comments from evaluators and MUST and "prepare a unit plan based on the unitization for teachers' guides". On the first day, MUST experts gave two presentations until tea break on "Review of Unitization and Modification of problems", and "examples of Unitization and Modification of Problems" followed by discussions. Then, for the next two and half days, the writers worked on their drafts to incorporate comments. The editor checked the correspondence between the examples and the exercises in the units where unitization had gone through. During individual work, MUST experts went to each participant and discussed particular issues of the units they were entrusted with.

At the end of each day, every participant reported his progress in modifying and incorporating comments followed by discussions. There was a heated discussion about the idea of giving an exercise question(s) similar to the example given and removing those that lack direct correspondence with the example. The math expert from MoE strongly argued against removing the questions. He said there should be a sufficient number of exercise questions. He noted the majority of Ethiopian students have no access to reference materials. According to him, the textbook is the only material they can get hold of. A content editor reported that some lessons do not have enough questions and suggested adding more questions. He also said some questions of exercises are misplaced and should be taken out and placed under the right topic.

On the 3rd day, developers were asked to submit units on which they were working during the workshop. The question of including competency in the textbook was raised and many were not in favor as it would make the textbook bulky and including it in the teachers' guides would be appropriate.

The textbook developers and the project will continue the revision process with the aim of introducing the new textbooks in September 2023.

Deputy team leader of MUST explains the purpose of the workshop.

A MUST expert and a textbook developer exchange ideas to improve the quality of textbooks.

Textbook developers have discussions among themselves to support each other.

Taking the textbook development into consideration, the Ministry of Education's Mathematics expert and MUST members discuss the content and sequence of the syllabus.