An excerpt from "The TIMSS: Looking at Classrooms around the World": Classroom Compass, Vol.3, #3, Spring 1997

The TIMSS videos of eighth-grade mathematics classrooms in Germany (100 classrooms), Japan (50 classrooms), and the United States (81 classrooms) provided glimpses of cultural differences in lesson goals and teaching strategies. A preliminary analysis of the tapes revealed that Japanese teachers, on average, came closer to implementing the spirit of ideas advanced by U. S. reformers than did U. S. teachers. In the United States and Germany, mathematics teachers tended to present instruction followed by application; the students observed a solution method, then practiced similar examples on their own. The lesson's goal was to solve problems. In Japanese classrooms, the problems were presented and the students spent some time reflecting on them and sharing solutions they generated. Developing an explicit understanding of the underlying mathematical concepts was the goal in those lessons. The videotapes illustrated other differences. The U. S. lessons were more frequently interrupted (both from outside the classroom and from within) than were the Japanese. Within the same lesson the U. S. lessons contained significantly more topics than did the Japanese. Japanese teachers were more likely to explicitly link different parts of the lesson. Viewing the lessons by international curriculum standards, the average eighth-grade U. S. lesson dealt with mathematics at a seventh-grade level, the Japanese presented ninth-grade level content, and the German classroom presented content at an eighth-grade level. An independent group of U. S. college mathematics teachers examined the quality of the videotaped lessons' content, basing their evaluations on detailed written summaries that disguised countries of origin. The teachers rated 30 percent of the Japanese lessons as having high content quality, as compared to 23 percent of the German lessons and none of the U. S. lessons. On the other hand, they rated 87 percent of the U. S. lessons as having low content quality.