Teaching for conceptual understanding: A cross-national comparison of the relationship between teachers’ instructional practices and student achievement in mathematics

Large-scale Assessments in Education

An IERI – International Educational Research Institute Journal

Table 3 Means and standard deviations for the measures of teaching for conceptual understanding ^a

How often do you ask students to…
		… interpret data in tables, charts or graphs	… write equations and functions to represent relationships	… apply facts, concepts and procedures to solve routine problems	…relate what they are learning in mathematics to their daily lives	… decide on their own procedures for solving complex problems	… work on problems for which there is no immediately obvious method of solution
U.S.	Mean	1.14	1.49	2.29	1.86	1.54	1.15
	S.E	0.001	0.002	0.002	0.003	0.002	0.002
	Std. Dev.	0.46	0.69	0.78	0.83	0.75	0.72
Korea	Mean	1.28	1.78	2.30	1.65	1.74	1.30
	S.E	0.004	0.004	0.004	0.004	0.005	0.004
	Std. Dev.	0.57	0.65	0.68	0.67	0.74	0.58
Japan	Mean	1.16	1.80	1.85	1.23	1.18	1.19
	S.E	0.003	0.004	0.005	0.003	0.003	0.004
	Std. Dev.	0.60	0.75	0.88	0.62	0.61	0.63
Singapore	Mean	1.09	1.48	2.00	1.38	1.13	0.88
	S.E	0.01	0.018	0.021	0.016	0.017	0.015
	Std. Dev.	0.38	0.69	0.83	0.61	0.66	0.59
ANOVA (df = 3, 630)^b
	F	4.18	9.67	11.17	24.40	25.73	11.92
	Sig.	<.01	<.001	<.001	<.001	<.001	<.001

^aAs TIMSS uses a complex sampling design, mathematics teachers’ sampling weights (MATWGT) were applied in the descriptive analyses to generate accurate estimates in each participating country.
^bFor the ANOVA, the alpha level was reduced to.05/6 or .008 to adjust for conducting six tests.