A Comparative Analysis of Classroom Instruction Dealing with Mode and Median: The Chinese and U.S. Different Mathematics Instructional Designs

The article chooses 3 lesson-cases dealing with the same content of “mode and median” from Chinese and American classrooms. The article attempts to investigate whether the cultural differences between China and the U.S. will influence on the implementation of instructional tasks by the means of “an analysis frame of mathematics instructional tasks”. We think that the differences between the two lesson-cases under the different cultural backgrounds are the resources which the two parties can introspect and draw lessons from in common, especially in how to promote the development of the cognitive level of the mathematical tasks.