Negotiating meaning in cross-national studies of mathematics teaching : kissing frogs to find princes

This paper outlines the iterative processes by which a multinational team of researchers developed a low‐inference framework for the analysis of video recordings of mathematics lessons drawn from Flemish Belgium, England, Finland, Hungary and Spain. Located within a theoretical framework concerning learning as the negotiation of meaning, we discuss problems of linguistic and conceptual equivalence and the manner by which they were resolved. Significantly, when compared with the time‐stamped codes of projects like the TIMSS video studies, we argue that the unit of analysis adopted, the episode, allowed for the distinctive patterns of a lesson to be retained for comparison with others. Also, we suggest that the framework’s generic, though subject‐focused, codes are amenable to adaptation to other curriculum areas, thus providing an opportunity for the comparative study of subjects not normally associated with work of this nature