according to level (primary or lower primary) may have important consequences on
the differential achievement of future teachers.
42.5.2 Contributions of TEDS-M
TEDS-M constituted not only thefirst nationally representative, correlational, and
cross-national research study on teacher education, but in higher education as well.
In this regard, TEDS-M laid the foundation for future rigorous cross-national
research in teacher education, providing common terminology, sampling methods,
instruments, and analytical approaches that can be adapted and improved in sub-
sequent teacher education studies as has been demonstrated by many researchers
since the TEDS-M Database became publicly available. Importantly, TEDS-M also
served to develop research capacity within the countries that participated in this
study and has already contributed to this new line of research through the public
dissemination of test items, the resulting database for secondary data analysis, and
various technical reports.
The results of TEDS-M provide a baseline for further investigations in the
countries that participated in the study. For example, content experts may look at
the descriptions of the levels of knowledge acquired by future teachers graduating
from their programs and investigate how changes in curriculum or other program
features may lead to improved learning. Policy makers may also benefit from
learning that encouraging more talented secondary school graduates to pursue
teacher education studies can lead to graduates who have higher levels of both
mathematics content knowledge and mathematics pedagogical content knowledge.
One conclusion that can be drawn from TEDS-M is that the goal of improving
future teachers’ mathematics content knowledge and mathematics pedagogy
knowledge through well-organized pre-service teacher education programs in
higher education is ambitious, but achievable.
42.6 A New Study: FIRSTMATH
Despite the important insights derived from TEDS-M, we still do not know how
much of what future teachers learn in pre-service programs will eventually con-
tribute to make them successful teachers or whether success in teaching is only
acquired in thefirst years on the job. FIRSTMATH^18 is a comparative study,
launched in June 2011 designed to begin to address this question. The study is
sponsored by NSF, and brings new and seasoned TEDS-M colleagues together in
(^18) Funding for FIRSTMATH is provided by a grant from the National Science Foundation Award
No. DRL-0910001. Principal Investigator: Maria Teresa Tatto.
632 M.T. Tatto