Mathematics Teacher Education Quality in TEDS-M: Globalizing the Views of Future Teachers and Teacher Educators
Source: Journal of Teacher Education, 62(2), March/April, 2011, p. 172-187.
(Reviewed by the Portal Team)
This article seeks to explore teacher education quality in terms of effectiveness among various countries.
The study constructed a number of indicators and using various TEDS-M collected or scaled data.
The framework includes five indicators: future teacher achievement, instructor effectiveness, coherence between universities and schools, courses/content arrangement, and overall effectiveness of teacher education programs.
The authors addressed three research questions:
1. What are the phenomena or patterns regarding effectiveness for each of the five indicators among the participating countries?
2. What are the levels of effectiveness for each of the five indicators for each country?
3. What are the correlations among these five indicators and the possible concomitant interpretations?
Research Method
The target populations in this study included future primary and lower secondary teachers in their last year of training to teach mathematics and teacher educators who instructed these future teachers in the fields of (a) mathematics and mathematics pedagogy and (b) general pedagogy.
This study shows that future teachers report that they benefit from both academic and school-based instructors in every participating country.
This result supports the necessity and appropriateness of integrating theoretical knowledge and practical teaching into teacher education.
Another finding is that among all participating countries, the program educators rated their courses/content arrangements much higher than their students did.
The educators' higher ratings may translate into a lack of motivation to improve.
Finally, this study produces a concept of synchronization by joining the three indicators—teaching coherence, the effectiveness of MR-instructors, and the effectiveness of SB-supervisors.
Data indicate that United States have well-organized programs and the most synchronized teaching in TEPs at both the lower secondary and primary levels.
This means that we can expect that U.S. teachers will be good at real classroom teaching in terms of building their instructional frameworks together with theoretical support.
However, the USA programs should pay more attention to the elevation of its future teachers’ knowledge achievements, which may be the reason why the overall effectiveness of the U.S. TEP does not stand out in the international ranks.