Trainee teachers' perception of fearures of expert science and mathematics teacher education

The current global movement in the reform of education seems to focus on a number of issues that include standards, quality, and teacher preparation. With regard to the latter, while teacher education curriculum in most parts of the world attempts to strike a balance between content and professional training, the emerging scenario is that of training expert teachers. Three types of knowledge identified as necessary for expert teaching are content knowledge, pedagogical knowledge, and pedagogical content knowledge. For Hong Kong to embark on a satisfactory and effective public education reform, it is absolutely essential that its most valuable human resource (i.e., teachers) must be comprehensively and adequately developed. Attention must be paid to both pre-service and in-service to raise an excellent quality-oriented teaching force for Hong Kong. Teacher educators and researchers make important and well-informed decisions about what should be included in pre-service and in-service teacher development programmes. However, it is also very important to take into account the teachers’ own perceptions about the areas in which they feel confident and knowledgeable and those in which they do not. One practical avenue of sourcing such valuable information is the teacher in training who is learning to acquire and display expertise. This paper reports on an investigation using a sample of 183 science and mathematics trainee teachers. A 60-item instrument, the Science and Mathematics Expert Teacher Preparation Survey (SMETPS) was developed to gather data on trainee-teachers’ perceptions of their current knowledge and what they think they need to know more about to become expert teachers. The data, analysed using both descriptive and inferential statistics, indicated that trainee teachers could make important contributions towards expert training. Several issues which emerged from the results have been discussed with reference to implications to current efforts in expert teacher training. Copyright © 2000 The Hong Kong Institute of Education.