An Analysis of the National Intended Geometry Curriculum

Geometrical concepts play a crucial role in developing spatial thinking and reasoning. Further, curricular materials play a key role in shaping student-learning experiences in the classroom. The organisation of the content of textbooks plays a decisive role in how and when students are introduced to concepts, especially given the ‘textbook-centric’ teaching practices observed in the Indian classroom. I thus analysed the geometry curriculum from grades one through eight through the lens of the five-level hierarchical van Hiele model of geometrical thinking.¹ I organised the analysis to highlight conceptual details at two levels—across a chapter in a particular grade level and across chapters in all the eight grade levels. The analysis has illuminated the affordances of curricular materials to constantly connect students to multiple levels of geometric reasoning, but at the same time it points to the need for reorganising the curriculum to enable students to systematically progress from visual-based to deduction-based reasoning. The analysis also calls for redesigning certain conceptual representations to promote relational geometrical understanding among students.