middle school math teacher preparation

William Schmidt is working on an international report. I like Schmidt. He's the coherent curriculum guy.

snippets:

• The mathematics knowledge of US future middle school mathematics teachers generally is very weak compared to future teachers in Taiwan and Korea. It is also weak compared to German future teachers in all areas except statistics.
  

• Taiwanese and Korean future teachers were the top performers in all five areas of mathematics knowledge – including algebra, functions, number, geometry and statistics.

• School algebra (which includes functions) is the topic that, across almost fifty countries studied in TIMSS, was the major focus of instruction at seventh and eighth grade.
  

• On the algebra and functions tests, US future teachers performed at or near the bottom among the six countries—over a full standard deviation below the performance of future Taiwanesse teachers.
  

• The results for the statistics test were the only bright spot in future US teachers’ performance. The US future teachers scored enar the mean of the six countries.
  

• Future middle school teachers prepared by a secondary program performed somewhere between one-half to three-fourths of a standard deviation higher in algebra, functions, geometry and number compared to those prepared in either of the other two programs. The difference was slightly less in statistics.

COURSE TAKING

• On average, the Taiwanese and Korean future teachers reported taking courses that covered around eighty percent or more of the advanced mathematics topics typically covered in undergraduate mathematics programs.
  

• For analysis (the study of functions) Taiwanese future teachers covered virtually all of the topics (ninety-six percent) while, in Korea, the coverage was seventy-nine percent.
  

• In the algebra and analysis courses which provide the mathematical background for middle school algebra, the Taiwanese, Korean and Bulgarian future teachers all covered around eighty percent or more of the possible topics while Germany covered around 60 to 70 percent.
  

• Mexican and US future teachers covered less than half of the analysis topics. The same was true for Mexico on the algebra topics, but US future teachers covered on average 56 percent of those topics.

etc.