42.4.1 Piloting the TEDS-M Study
In 2000, a comprehensive review of the research literature supported a call to the
teacher education and development community to move beyond purely descriptive
or explanatory studies towards more exploratory and evaluative, policy-relevant,
and prospective studies to test the various hypotheses underlying teacher education
and development (Tatto 2000 , 2008 ). Subsequently, the National Science
Foundation (NSF) encouraged and supported a proposal for such a study.^12 In 2003
the NSF supported a pilot study for the larger IEA TEDS-M. In collaboration with
colleagues from Bulgaria, Taiwan, Germany, Mexico, South Korea, and the United
States, we initiated an exploratory study of how lower-secondary mathematics
teachers learn to teach mathematics content effectively as a result of their
preparation.
The mainfindings from this pilot study indicated that the opportunities to learn
provided by teacher education programs impacted what future teacher knew and
believed when they left their teacher education programs. The future teachers in the
particular programs selected for study in Taiwan and South Korea seemed to be
most knowledgeable on questions asking them about mathematics and pedagogy
concepts.^13 Contrary to expectations, however, the opportunities to learn provided
to these highly knowledgeable future teachers were for the most part balanced
across mathematics, mathematics pedagogy, and general pedagogy (including
practical pedagogy). The future teachers from Mexico whose programs emphasized
general pedagogy also did quite well in these questions, suggesting the importance
of providing coherent opportunities to learn to future teachers. While much was
accomplished in this pilot study, there were important limitations. For example, the
study did not develop an assessment of teacher knowledge having instead a series
of questions that covered some but not all of the knowledge domains expected from
future mathematics teachers, these were then constituted as an ex-post-facto test of
knowledge; the study was only limited to lower-secondary future teachers (e.g., we
had no questions directed at future primary school teachers); and the study did not
develop a sampling frame to help select representative samples of future teachers in
participating countries to answer our surveys, and used instead a convenience
sample. Thus, we learned little in P-TEDS about these three areas, which came to
represent important challenges for TEDS-M.
(^12) I am thankful to Larry Suter and Elizabeth VanderPutten of the NSF for their encouragement in
this initial stage of the TEDS-M work. I am also thankful to Janice Earle and James Dietz for their
support as NSF program officers for the P-TEDS and TEDS-M studies respectively.
(^13) In the pilot study, we did not design a test per se; the questions that were developed were
constituted into scales after the future teachers had answered them. Thus, the P-TEDS pilot study
fulfilled its purpose, it made it possible to test different strategies for data collection, clarified
whether it was possible to ask future teachers questions about their knowledge, and allowed us to
learn whether our initial research questions were significant and could be investigated empirically
in a larger study.
628 M.T. Tatto