ABSTRACT
This chapter gives a review of typical pedagogical theories and practices in school mathematics and large-scale studies conducted in two domains of international comparisons – the comparison of mathematics learning outcomes and the comparison of mathematics teaching practices. It looks at the effort and outputs generated by two communities of researchers focusing on: mathematics pedagogy and international comparisons of mathematics learning and teaching. As a way of differentiating teaching, streaming or setting has also existed for a long time in schools in Western countries, such as the UK and the US. In England, streaming became the norm in the 1950s, and schools generally streamed pupils into different ability classes and taught them all subjects in a fixed class. Since the first international assessment in the 1950s, there have mainly been three groups of cross-national assessments namely: the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA), the Educational Testing Service (ETS) and the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).
