National Center for Education Statistics
March 2003
NCES has issued a 222 page report (and CD with video clips) that supplements previous TIMSS reports with an extensive investigation of teaching practices in eighth grade math classrooms in a number of countries. There is a wealth of interesting, if dryly presented, information here about comparative pedagogies and classroom methods (at least in math). There's also much complexity, as it turns out that "Different methods of mathematics teaching can be associated with high scores on international achievement tests." There is, we again find, no "one best system." Behind the bland prose, much of what is said about U.S. 8th grade math classes is troubling - and helps to explain the mediocrity of our 8th grade TIMSS results. For example, "Through most of the first half of the lesson time in the United States, the majority of eighth-grade mathematics lessons focused on reviewing previously learned content....[T]he United States was among the countries with the smallest percentage of lesson time devoted to introducing and practicing new content (48 percent)....69 percent of the problems per lesson were found to be posed with the apparent intent of using procedures - problems that are typically solved by applying a procedure or set of procedures - a higher percentage than problems that were posed with the apparent intent of making connections between ideas, factors, or procedures, or problems that were posed with the apparent intent of eliciting a mathematical convention or concept....91 percent of the problems per lesson in the United States were found to have been solved by giving results only without discussion of how the answer was obtained or by focusing on the procedures necessary to solve the problem...." You can obtain this report by http://nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/pubsinfo.asp?pubid=2003013.
