A second explanation the researchers consider is that countries have shaped teaching by evolving classroom methods in alignment with national cultural beliefs, expectations, and values. These would include beliefs about the nature of a subject and how students learn, expectations about the level of performance students should demonstrate, and the values held for school processes and outcomes. There are reasons to think that these beliefs, expectations, and values differ across countries.
The broad goal of the mathematics portion of the TIMSS 1999 Video Study was to describe and compare teaching practices in eighth-grade mathematics in a variety of countries, including those with varying cultural traditions and with high mathematics achievement as measured by the TIMSS 1995 assessment. Countries participating in the TIMSS 1999 Mathematics Video Study were Australia, the Czech Republic, Hong Kong SAR, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and the United States. The researchers also evaluated video of instruction in Japan as part of the 1995 study. Based upon their examination of the videos, they conclude that even though teaching in a given country may exhibit a common pattern, this does not mean that the pattern is unique. In fact, the patterns within countries tended to share some features observed in other countries. Many of the features within the three dimensions examined ( purpose of activity, interaction structure, and content activity ) were discernible in all seven countries, and there was some convergence across all countries. Global convergence was most evident in the forms used by teachers to review at the beginning of the lessons and during public interaction at the beginning and end of lessons. This suggests that teachers would have little difficulty recognizing, in a general sense, what their counterparts in other countries were doing at many points in a lesson. However, they might also be surprised and interested in the different ways in which familiar practices were sequenced and used, and the different ways that lessons unfolded. Different sequences can enable different methods of teaching and different learning experiences for students.