Mathematics teacher preparation examined in an international context: learning from the Teacher Education and Development Study in Mathematics (TEDS-M) and beyond

Abstract

This thematic issue contains a collection of papers that resulted from the recent Teacher Education and Development Study in Mathematics (TEDS-M), a study that is the first large-scale international comparative study on mathematics teacher preparation undertaken under the auspices of the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA). The significance of TEDS-M itself has been well articulated by different authors in this thematic issue. As the importance of teachers and teaching has been commonly acknowledged for the improvement of students’ achievement in school mathematics (e.g., Sowder 2007), it becomes apparent that we need to examine and understand possible influences of system policy and institutional practices on the outcomes of mathematics teacher preparation both within an education system (e.g., Wilson, Floden, and Ferrini-Mundy 2001) and in an international context (e.g., Leung and Li 2010). The contributions of this thematic issue build upon TEDS-M, including several reports of selected findings from that study. Moreover, this thematic issue goes above and beyond direct reporting of TEDS-M, and includes unique contributions with different natures. To make these contributions explicit, I will highlight some of them as follows.