Mathematics Teaching in Italy and the United States
Research Projects
Comparing Mathematics Teaching in Italy, Germany, and the United States
My investigations of teaching practices in different cultures began with a study of mathematics teaching in Italy, in which I extended the TIMSS video study’s methods to the cross-cultural analysis of eighth-grade Italian videotaped lessons.
Relevant publications:
- Santagata and Stigler, 2000;
- Santagata and Barbieri, 2005;
Teacher Responses to Students' Mistakes in Eighth-Grade Italian and U.S. Mathematics Lessons
This project focuses on a fundamental aspect of the teaching-learning process: teacher-student interactions involving mistakes. The ways such interactions occur in the classroom have important consequences on both students’ learning.
The study included sixty videotaped eighth-grade math lessons (30 in Italy and 30 in the U.S.), as well as interviews with teachers and students and videotapes of elementary-school classes. Discourse analytic and ethnographic approaches were combined with quantification of some aspects of the observed interactions. Findings revealed that Italian and U.S. students have different experiences with mistakes; these depend largely on how teachers organize instructional activities and frame classroom participant roles. Mistakes are discussed publicly in Italy twice as often as in the United States. Italian teachers ask the student to correct his/her mistake, while U.S. teachers ask another student in the class to correct the mistake; U.S. teachers mitigate their responses; Italian teachers aggravate them. Teachers in both countries do not take full advantage of mistakes as tools for learning. The study’s conclusions reveal mistake-handling activities as culturally specific interplays of beliefs and practices, rather than intentional applications of psychological learning theories.
Relevant publications:
- Sterponi & Santagata, 2001;
- Santagata & Sterponi, 2001;
- Santagata, 2004;
- Santagata, 2005.