Scholars and experts around the world increasingly agree that the advantages of collection of videos of teaching practices can be significant (Hiebert et al., 2002; Clark, 2006; Janik & Seidel, 2009; Klette 2009). Video can reveal practices more clearly, facilitate discovery of new alternatives, stimulate to discussion about choices within each instructional practice and context, and deepen educators’ understanding of teaching. Video also enables the study of complex processes, enables coding from multiple perspectives and facilitates integrations of qualitative and quantitative information.

In this symposium we will use video data from the PISA+ Video study in Norway as a baseline for analysing instructional practices in Norwegian classrooms. Based on 150 video taped lessons from math- , science- and reading classrooms in Norway we will show how video documentation allow for multiple analyses and which contribute to widen our understanding of how instruction and teaching practices contribute to students’ learning. The PISA+ study was designed for pursue the problematic findings within the Norwegian PISA score. The study was designed as a comprehensive video study with a three camera solution (teacher, class, pair of students) and with an ambition to capture offered and experienced learning activities in math-, science and reading classrooms. By extensive documentation of classroom activities in the three PISA domains we wanted to shed light on how we can understand teaching and learning practices in Norwegian classrooms.

The following four papers present how in depths studies of teaching and learning activities from respectively math, science and reading classrooms, and developed within a common methodological design can expand our understanding factors of relevance when examining instructional practices. The four papers indicate how videoanalyses alone or in combination with additional data sources (achievement data and different types of interview data) explore our conception of productive instructional practices within the three PISA domains.

Two papers rely on video data exclusively (Klette & Anderssson), Roe and Dalland papers combine video data with interview data (i.e. both video stimulated student interviews and audio based interviews) and Bergem combine video analyses with the Norwegian PISA score (achievement data). 

One paper discusses challenges for reading instruction. Two papers discuss how individualized teaching methods in math classrooms reduce students' opportunities to learn math, and two papers demonstrates contradictions in instructional practices in science classrooms with reference to teacher student interaction. Together the five papers show how studies of instructional practices profit from appropriate blending of a rich variety of available methodologies, and which can range from complex statistical analyses based on quantitative data at the one side, through intensive interaction analyses based on videodocumentation and interviews on the other.