International Comparative Studies on Mathematics Education: A Viewpoint from the Anthropological Theory of Didactics

Comparative studies aim to identify and explain differences of homologous phenomena in two or more contexts. Comparative studies of mathematics teaching and learning are undertaken with a variety of purposes and methods, and their results and interpretations remain the subject of fierce debates, especially in the case of large-scale quantitative surveys such as PISA. Even if the measurement of student performance is not its central preoccupation, didactic research is certainly concerned with these debates. This paper first proposes a model for clarifying the levels at which comparison is done, based on the anthropological theory of didactics. Using this model, we then propose a synthetic analysis of a selected body of international comparative research on mathematics education (from large-scale surveys to small-scale binary comparisons in doctoral projects) with the particular aim of understanding how the different studies differ and relate.