Purpose of the Public Release Lessons

Video examples are essential for communicating the results of video studies. All of the teachers filmed for the TIMSS 1999 Video Study were assured confidentiality, and their lessons cannot be shown publicly. However, a small group of teachers from each country were recruited who agreed to have their lessons videotaped for public release. Written permission to show these lessons publicly was obtained in each country, following the appropriate procedures in that country. Typically, permission was obtained from the teachers and from the parents of the students appearing in the videos.

Dissemination of these public release lessons serves multiple purposes. The videos provide a concrete basis for interpreting the quantitative findings of the TIMSS 1999 Video Study. They provide illustrations of key findings that communicate more clearly than written reports or oral presentations alone.

In addition, video-enhanced definitions can, over time, provide educators with a set of shared referents for commonly used descriptors, such as "problem solving." This could yield a shared language of classroom practice, an essential tool in building a widely shared professional knowledge base for teaching.

Videotapes can become a compelling source of new ideas for teaching. Because these new ideas are concrete and grounded in practice, they have immediate practical potential for teachers.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, these public release videos enable teachers and researchers around the world to view samples of the kind of lessons that were analyzed as part of TIMSS 1999 Video Study and to stimulate local and international discussions of mathematics teaching.

Collecting the Public Release Mathematics Lessons

The process of collecting mathematics lessons to be considered for public release varied between countries. Two countries, Australia and Hong Kong SAR, were able to obtain permissions from teachers taped as part of the original TIMSS 1999 Video Study sample. The Czech Republic, Netherlands, Switzerland and the United States videotaped additional eighth-grade mathematics. Public release videos from Japan were collected as part of the TIMSS 1995 Video Study and no additional lessons were collected.

It was considered very important that lesson videos to be publicly released reflect as much as possible the kinds teaching that were seen in the study sample. Selection of the tapes was conducted using a consistent approach organized by a sub-committee of the mathematics code development team. The procedure began with each country being asked to provide 10-12 candidate lessons. Country teams, including code developers and coders, reviewed the lessons. They followed a standard set of guidelines to focus their reviews and identified the lessons that would be most illustrative of the key characteristics of mathematics teaching in their country as represented in the TIMSS 1999 Video Study sample. Country teams then presented their recommendations to the sub-committee of the math code development team, final selection of four lessons was made, and approval from each National Research Coordinator was sought.

Following the selection process, the lessons were processed - digitized, transcribed, and coded - as needed. Once coded, the lessons were checked by the math code development team to ensure that they were in fact representative of those in the sample for each country. In all cases those selected were found to be representative.

Obtaining the Mathematics Public Release Lessons

Obtaining the Full Set of Lessons

LessonLab is now offering a four-CD set that contains video and related materials for 28 complete mathematics lessons, four from each country in the study (i.e., Australia, the Czech Republic, Hong Kong SAR, Japan, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and the United States). In addition to lesson videos, the CDs include a video-linked transcript of each lesson in English and the native language, video-linked commentaries by the teachers, researchers, and national research coordinators in English and the native language, worksheets and textbook pages used during each lesson, and one page "lesson graphs" that describe the content and sequence of each lesson.

These complete lessons - all in the public domain -are intended for use by district administrators and professional development providers who want to use the videos as part of their teacher learning programs. They are intended to augment the research findings and encourage wide public discussion of teaching and how to improve it.

Click here to order: TIMSS 1999 Video Study Mathematics Public Release Lessons

Obtaining Selected Video Clips

A series of examples from the mathematics public release lessons is also available as an accompaniment to the report Teaching Mathematics in Seven Countries: Results from the TIMSS 1999 Video Study. These are short video clips that illustrate many of the codes used to analyze the videotaped lessons. A copy of the report (including the video examples) can be viewed or ordered from the National Center for Educational Statistic's (NCES) website.