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Teacher Education Effectiveness: Quality and Equity of Future Primary and Future Lower Secondary Teachers’ General Pedagogical Knowledge

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International Perspectives on Teacher Knowledge, Beliefs and Opportunities to Learn

Part of the book series: Advances in Mathematics Education ((AME))

Abstract

For more than two decades, three components of teacher knowledge have been discussed, namely, content knowledge (CK), pedagogical content knowledge (PCK), and general pedagogical knowledge (GPK). Although there is a growing body of analytic clarification and empirical testing with regard to CK and PCK, especially with a focus on mathematics teachers, hardly any attempt has been made to learn more about teachers’ GPK. In the context of the Teacher Education and Development Study in Mathematics (TEDS-M), Germany, Taiwan, and the United States worked on closing this research gap by conceptualizing a theoretical framework and developing a standardized test of GPK, which was taken by representative samples of future elementary and middle school teachers in these countries. Four task-based subdimensions of GPK and three cognitive subdimensions of GPK were distinguished in this test. TEDS-M data are used (a) to test the hypothesis that GPK is not homogenous but multidimensional and (b) to compare the achievement of future elementary and middle school teachers in Germany, Taiwan and the US. The data revealed that US future teachers were outperformed by both the other groups. They showed a relative strength in one of the cognitive subdimensions, generating strategies to perform in the classroom, indicating that in particular they had acquired procedural GPK during teacher education.

Expanded version of König et al. (2011).

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Since we plan to use the test instrument in future studies, we cannot include more item examples in this article. If other researchers are interested in doing research in this field, we will be pleased to provide a complete documentation of a shorter version of the instrument with half of the test item pool, including various materials such as coding rubrics, scoring instruction, empirically based information on item parameters, and test booklets. This documentation (König and Blömeke 2010c) allows to use the GPK test independently from the authors who developed it. Please contact the initial author of this article for further information.

  2. 2.

    Another psychometric indicator is the item fit statistics. The weighted mean squares mainly ranged from 0.80 to 1.20 with a few exceptions, which is a good result (Adams 2002; Wright et al. 1994). Exceptions occurred when an item could not be excluded for theoretical reasons. Then we accepted weighted mean squares ranging from 0.75 to 0.79 and from 1.21 to 1.25.

  3. 3.

    To investigate the internal consistency of the four dimensions we used “Expected a posteriori estimation (EAP)” as these parameters deliver an unbiased estimation of the population and take into account the multidimensional structure of the model (Wu 1997).

  4. 4.

    The item fit indices generally showed a slight improvement in the four-dimensional model compared to the one-dimensional model. The deviance of the two models revealed that the four-dimensional model fits the data significantly better than the one-dimensional model. Thus, there were in fact several indications suggesting the hypothesized multidimensionality of future middle school teachers’ GPK.

  5. 5.

    Fischer (2004) once explained ipsative measures by using the following analogy: “Let us consider the example of a mouse and an elephant. Assume someone measured the extremities of both animals and used within-subject (within-animal) standardization [i.e. ipsative measures]. If the researcher would now proceed to compare the length of, let us say, the legs, probably no significant differences would be found. This is despite the fact that the legs of an elephant and a mouse are surely different. This is because all the measures are related to the size of the whole animal. […] If we compare the tail of the mouse and the elephant using ipsative measures, we would probably conclude that the mouse’s tail is significantly longer than the tail of the elephant. It is important to note that this comparison makes sense only if we consider the length of the tail relative to the overall size of both animals. Obviously, relative to the overall size of the mouse and the elephant, the mouse’s tail is longer than the tail of the elephant.”

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Cologne, Gronewaldstr. 2, 50931, Cologne, Germany

    J. König

  2. Humboldt-University of Berlin, Berlin, Germany

    S. Blömeke

  3. Department of Teacher Education, College of Education, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, 48824, USA

    L. Paine

  4. Michigan State University, 620 Farm Lane, Erickson Hall, Room 238, East Lansing, MI, 48824, USA

    W. H. Schmidt

  5. National Taiwan Normal University, Taipei, Taiwan

    F.-J. Hsieh

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  1. J. König
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  2. S. Blömeke
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  3. L. Paine
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  4. W. H. Schmidt
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  5. F.-J. Hsieh
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Correspondence to J. König .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin Syst. Didaktik & Unterrichtsforschung, Berlin, Germany

    Sigrid Blömeke

  2. National Taiwan Normal University Department of Mathematics, Taipei, T´ai-pei, Taiwan

    Feng-Jui Hsieh

  3. Inst. Didaktik der Mathematik, Universität Hamburg FB Erziehungswissenschaft, Hamburg, Germany

    Gabriele Kaiser

  4. Michigan State University College of Education, East Lansing, Michigan, USA

    William H. Schmidt

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König, J., Blömeke, S., Paine, L., Schmidt, W.H., Hsieh, FJ. (2014). Teacher Education Effectiveness: Quality and Equity of Future Primary and Future Lower Secondary Teachers’ General Pedagogical Knowledge. In: Blömeke, S., Hsieh, FJ., Kaiser, G., Schmidt, W. (eds) International Perspectives on Teacher Knowledge, Beliefs and Opportunities to Learn. Advances in Mathematics Education. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6437-8_9

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