MATHEMATICS PRE-SERVICE TEACHERS' KNOWLEDGE AND APPLICATION OF GENERAL PEDAGOGY: A SINGAPORE STUDY

Under the auspices of the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA), the Teacher Education and Development Study in Mathematics (TEDS-M)was conducted in sixteen countries over the last three years. It examined the participating countries' mathematics teacher preparation programs and their impact on the subject content and pedagogical knowledge, as well as the beliefs about teaching of future mathematics teachers. This paper presents findings on the knowledge of general pedagogy of future teachers attending the pre-service programs at the National Institute of Education (NIE), Singapore. It shows that although Singapore ranked among the top three countries in terms of their future teachers' knowledge of content and teaching of mathematics, there were areas for improvement in terms of their knowledge and understanding of general pedagogy. There were however, distinct differences in the performance of the future primary (elementary) school teachers as compared to the secondary (high) school teachers, with the former generally outperforming the latter in both the understanding of theoretical concepts as well as their application in the practice of teaching.