Abstract
This article analyses and compares Czech secondary school mathematics textbooks designated for vocational schools from the perspective of financial relationships and dependencies. Understanding financial relationships and dependencies, such as inflation or the relationship between the potential return of an investment and its riskiness, play an important role in financial literacy and indeed are implicitly present in the Czech Financial Literacy Standard.
Functional thinking is an important prerequisite for understanding financial relationships and dependencies. Moreover, financial topics may be motivating and suitable contexts for developing such thinking.
We performed a comparative analysis of four sets of Czech secondary mathematics textbooks designated for vocational schools to evaluate the extent to which their tasks may help pupils gain a deeper understanding of financial relationships and dependencies and develop their functional thinking. Our comparative analyses indicate that these mathematics textbooks do not provide teachers and pupils with opportunities to gain insights into the relationships and dependencies in financial education and fail to fully exploit the potential of the tasks with financial contexts to develop pupils' functional thinking.
The importance of the study lies in its focus on the connection between financial education and functional thinking, a link which has been missing in the literature we are familiar with.