42.5.1 Findings from TEDS-M
The TEDS-M study provided new insight into the nature of teacher education across
the participating countries. Different from other IEA studies that have focused on
primary and secondary education systems, this study of teacher education revealed
that these systems are not standardized and are rather highly complex. The teacher
education programs in the TEDS-M samples varied in terms of size and nature. Of
the 750 programs studied about 45% (349 programs) exclusively prepared future
teachers to teach primary pupils; about 30% (226 programs) exclusively prepared
future teachers to teach secondary pupils; and the rest (176 programs) prepared
future teachers to teach primary and secondary pupils (Tatto et al. 2012 ). The study
found that opportunities to learn mathematics, mathematics pedagogy, and peda-
gogy depended at a general level on the grade level and the curriculum future
teachers were expected to teach. For example, compared to the programs preparing
lower secondary school teachers, the programs for future primary teachers gave
more coverage to the basic concepts of numbers, measurement, and geometry and
less coverage to functions, probability and statistics, calculus, and structure.
Furthermore, the programs preparing upper secondary teachers tended to either
require or provide on average more opportunities to learn mathematics than those
programs that prepared teachers for lower secondary schools. Thefindings of this
study thus reflect what seems in some countries to be a cultural norm, namely the
idea that teachers who are expected to teach in primary—and especially lower
primary—grades do not need much mathematics content beyond that included in the
school curriculum. The pattern among secondary future teachers is characterized by
more and deeper coverage of mathematics content; however, there was more
variability in opportunity to learn mathematics content among those being prepared
for lower secondary (known in some countries as“middle school”) than among
those being prepared to teach upper secondary (grade 11 and above).
Not surprisingly, therefore, we also found that knowledge for teaching mathe-
matics varies considerably among individuals within countries as well as between
countries. On average, future primary teachers prepared as mathematics specialists
had higher mathematical content knowledge and mathematical pedagogical content
knowledge than those prepared to be lower primary generalist teachers. And, on
average, future teachers prepared as upper secondary teachers had higher scores in
our assessments on both these measures than those being prepared to be lower
secondary teachers. Additionally, primary-level and secondary-level teachers in
high-achieving systems, such as those in Singapore, Taiwan, and the Russian
Federation, had significantly more opportunities to learn university- and
school-level mathematics than primary and secondary teachers in others countries
(see Tatto et al. 2012 for a full report of the studyfindings).
In sum, the design of teacher education curricula can have substantial effects on
the level of knowledge that future teachers are able to acquire via the opportunities
to learn provided to them. Even within the same country, the design of the program
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