2025.4.10

Minister of Education of Chile inaugurated a project to improve mathematics education using textbooks supervised by Dr. Masami Isoda, and President of Universidad de Chile and Ambassador Plenipotentiary of Japan to Chile delivered congratulatory speeches at the ceremony

On April 10, a ceremony was held by the Chilean Ministry of Education to inaugurate the project to improve mathematics education using textbooks supervised by Dr. Masami Isoda, Senior Professor of the Bureau of Global Initiatives, University of Tsukuba.

Mr. Nicolás Cataldo, Minister of Education of Chile, announced the adoption of Sumo Primero as a national textbook. At the ceremony, the Mr. Cataldo stated: “Sumo Primero paves the way for a cognitive revolution, challenging the ways of thinking required today. In this plan, we, Chilean universities, foreign universities like University of Tsukuba, and various other institutions, in a context of daily collaboration, are motivated and delighted by the challenge of promoting quality education. It shows how the educational policies developed by our country are bearing fruit and how we can achieve their goals for the children who are most important to us.”

The adoption of the Chilean textbook at each school is based on a system in which each company submits a bid to the Ministry of Education, the government selects two companies for each school year, and public schools choose one of them for distribution to each school. As a result, there had been no consistency between grades, no effective way to systematically advance learning, to foster mathematical perspectives and thinking or to share and improve good practices with each other. Chile is known for its severe educational disparities across its country among the OECD countries, and mathematical literacy is indispensable for its improvement. Sumo Primero, the mathematics textbook supervised by Dr. Masami Isoda, was developed by the Ministry of Education of Chile as a textbook to nurture children to think independently, and 70% of elementary schools have been using it, even though it was not part of the bid system. Sumo Primero is now a national textbook used by all public elementary schools, 30,000 teachers, and 1.3 million students in 15 regions and metropolitan areas throughout Chile.

In this project, Dr. Salome Martinez of the Center for Mathematical Modeling, Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, University of Chile, who developed the textbook, and Dr. Isoda of CRICED, Center for Research on International Cooperation in Educational Development, University of Tsukuba, and universities in 16 Chilean regions are collaborating to improve math education using Sumo Primero. The project will also promote the improvement and revision of the Sumo Primero.

In the evening of the same day, a ceremony was held at the auditorium of the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, hosted by the University of Chile, a partner university of the University of Tsukuba, where Dr. Rosa Devés, rector of University of Chile, and Ambassador Ms. Kyoko Ito, Ambassador of the Embassy of Japan in Chile, delivered congratulatory speeches. Ms. Ito expressed her expectations for the future development of the collaboration initiated by Dr. Isoda with 14 Chilean universities and the National Institute of Education since 2005 through the JICA training program, the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) Collaborative Integration Project, as well as the APEC Lesson Study Project. These projects have resulted in the establishment of a 20-year collaboration with many people involved in the project, including Dr. Soledad Estrella (current president of the Chilean Society for Mathematics Education) and Dr. Raimundo Olfos (former president) of the Pontifical Catholic University of Valparaiso, who worked on the translation of the math textbook “Minna to Manabu Shogakko Sansu (Study with your Friends: Mathematics” (GAKKOTOSHO Co., Ltd.) by the mathenatics department of Elementary School, University of Tsukuba.

On April 11, the following day, the inauguration ceremony of the Province of Valparaiso was held under the auspices of the Rector of the Pontifical Catholic University of Valparaiso. At each of the three ceremonies, Dr. Isoda gave a lecture explaining that Sumo Primero is a textbook that fosters mathematical way of thinking, and that it is a textbook with a system that enables children to develop a way of thinking that will be useful in later lessons.

Photo: Courtesy of the Ministry of Education and University of Chile