At all levels of mathematics education, resources play a critical role in teaching and learning of mathematics; and the integration of resources into mathematical practice has been a motivation for researchers. In recent years, researchers have focused on the interaction between mathematics teacher and resources and their consequences for professional growth. They have attempted to analyze and examine the way of teachers’ interaction with resources from different point of views (e.g., Brown, 2009; Haggarty & Pepin, 2002; Remillard, 1999, 2005; Sherin & Dake, 2004). Particularly, the documentational approach of didactics provides a similar perspective within the research studies on teachers’ use of resources in terms of teachers’ interaction with them, but focuses more precisely on what a teacher needs to do for designing and enacting his/her teaching (Gueudet & Trouche, 2009). As a new area of research, little is known about this approach focusing on the ways of teachers’ documentation work in mathematics. However, there has been a growing interest in the studies of investigating the teacher-resource interaction (e.g., Gueudet, Pepin, & Trouche, 2013; Kieran, Tanguay, & Solares, 2011; Maschietto & Trouche, 2010; Sabra & Trouche, 2011).

The documentational approach provides an intertwined process between teacher and resources which is represented by instrumentation (resources supporting teacher’s activity) and instrumentalization (teacher working on resources) (Gueudet & Trouche, 2009). It includes how teachers engage and interact with resources as well as what kinds of constraints and potentialities of resources shape the teacher. One crucial constructs of the documentational approach of didactics is documentation work as including everything as a resource which plays a crucial role for a teacher who draws on them in his/her activity such as textbook, piece of software, student sheet, discussion with a colleague or with students, etc. Gueudet and Trouche (2009) did not isolate resources from one another; they noticed that resources should be remained as “a set of resources” (p. 200). However, the conceptualization of set of resources in many research studies on teachers’ use of resources has not received sufficient attention; in fact it is often ignored. In the current study, the documentational approach of didactics offers an opportunity not only to investigate mathematics teachers’ use of resources, particularly textbooks, as well as their use of personal records, discussion with students and colleagues, and supportive materials, but also to discuss the factors affecting the documentational work.

The purpose of the study was to determine the factors affecting mathematics teachers’ documentational work.  The documentational approach of didactics provided a comprehensive framework in terms of examining mathematics teachers’ documentational work and teachers’ interaction with resources. Mathematics textbooks were considered as main resources for teaching and learning of mathematics since set of mathematics textbooks (e.g., student edition textbook, workbook, teacher edition textbook, and auxiliary book) provided materials for students and teachers. While the research context is Turkey, the findings of the study can be valuable both for European contexts as well as for international context considering that the national characteristics have an impact for rendering more precise information about the documentation work, as proposed by Gueudet and Trouche (2009).

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