Quality of Mathematics Teaching: A Question of Perspective

This paper presents an explorative study that deals with the question concerning the extent to which the quality of the same mathematics lesson receives similar or divergent ratings if it is evaluated by means of three different high-inference analysis instruments. The three instruments differ not only in their theoretical perspective and in the selection of the quality aspects they focus on, but also in their inclusion of and emphasis on rather non-domain-specific characteristics of lesson quality and rather domain-specific ones. The mathematics lesson to be analyzed comes from a sixth-grade classroom and is held by a pre-service teacher. During the lesson, the pre-service teacher makes various technical mistakes, which go uncorrected, however. The results indicate that the teaching quality of the same mathematics lesson gets different ratings depending on the analysis instrument used. In particular, the instruments do not take account of the lack of technical correctness in the same way. Building on the results of the analysis, key quality dimensions are worked out and systematically related. These findings, in turn, are used to expand the construct “quality of mathematics teaching” by developing a hierarchically structured model of the quality of mathematics lessons, which is thereafter put up for discussion. © 2017, GDM.