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Who'll Fill the Gap: continued
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Hmmm. I'm digressing. Let's move on and take a look at the video component of the TIMSS. The study attempted to collect 100 lessons each from Germany, Japan, and the United States. That didn't happen. Only Germany met the goal of 100. Fifty Japanese classes were videotaped and 81 U.S. lessons were documented on cassette.
| Once inside the classroom, the videographers collected two main types of data: a videotape of the lesson and a questionnaire response from the teacher. They also collected supplementary materials. Each classroom was videotaped for one complete lesson on a date convenient for the teacher. (p. 18) |
To insure that any given teacher wouldn't select their "best class" for the videotaping,
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"... the video sample was constructed to be a random subsample of the full TIMSS sample every eighth-grade math teacher in the country and each of the teacher's classes had an equal chance of being selected for the study. (p. 19)"
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The authors acknowledge that what they saw might not be totally typical. However, they report:
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... students were on their best behavior in front of the camera, so we believe the videotapes do not show the normal frequency with which teachers must discipline their students. On the other hand, it seems unlikely that teachers asked completely different kinds of questions while being videotaped than they did when the camera was not present. (p. 20)
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That classrooms tend to exhibit a constancy in questioning strategy over time is a critical point. I remember being very skeptical of a presentation at an NSTA convention when the speaker said he could tell from a one-lesson video whether a teacher was using inquiry on a regular basis. I questioned that. He responded that if a teacher used inquiry-like questions only for the lesson being videotaped, students would not know how to respond. [For more on the concept of teaching techniques to help with open-ended/inquiry concepts, see "Tune Up Your Teaching,".]
Because of that NSTA conference experience, and others since, I have no trouble believing that the summaries of teaching styles and concept difficulty included in the lessons generated by the TIMSS videotapes are accurate. The summaries of style and content are:
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...German teachers are in charge of the mathematics and that the mathematics is quite advanced…A good motto for German teaching would be ‘developing advanced procedures.’ …In Japan, teachers take a less active role, allowing their students to invent their own procedures… An appropriate motto for Japanese teaching would be 'structured problem solving.’ …In the United States, content is not totally absent, but the level is less advanced and requires much less mathematical reasoning than the other two countries… the [U.S.] motto is ‘learning terms and practicing procedures.' (p. 27)
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One scary item uncovered by TIMSS was
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"...an analysis of the grade level at which the majority of the forty-one TIMSS counties gave the most concentrated attention to each mathematical topic…The topics in the eighth-grade videotaped lessons were matched against this scale. The United States lagged significantly behind Germany and Japan. By international standards, the mathematical content of U.S. lessons was, on average, at a mid-seventh-grade level, whereas German and Japanese lessons were at the high eighth- and beginning ninth-grade levels, respectively. This means that most eighth-graders in the United States study topics that students in many other countries encounter a year earlier. (p. 57)
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Science Education Reform Index
