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This paper presents empirical evidence regarding the capacity of teacher education programs to influence the values and beliefs of those who enroll in them and offers insight into the conditions that may be conducive to such effects. Our study shows that although teacher education faculty and enrollees across the programs studied subscribe to ideals of social justice and fairness in regard to teaching diverse learners, it is less clear how they translate these ideals into their views concerning curriculum design and implementation, assessment of student progress, and classroom and school organization. Our findings indicate that lay culture norms among enrollees are strongly ingrained and that most teacher education, as it is currently structured, is a weak intervention to alter particular views regarding the teaching and management of diverse learners.

In 2005, the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA), Michigan State University, and the Australian Council for Educational Research took an important step in advancing the field of education by partnering to develop and implement the first international and comparative study of mathematics teacher education. The study was made possible by the substantial funding received from the National Science Foundation, the IEA, and the collaboration of 17 participating countries. The purpose of this article is to illustrate the methodology used in this major cross-national study of teacher education-the IEA Teacher Education and Development Study in Mathematics, known as TEDS-M-and to share its main findings related to the mathematical preparation of future teachers.

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Cross-national research studies such as the Program for International Student Assessment and the Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) have contributed much to our understandings regarding country differences in student achievement in mathematics, especially at the primary (elementary) and lower secondary (middle school) levels. TIMSS, especially, has demonstrated the central role that the concept of opportunity to learn plays in understanding cross-national differences in achievement Schmidt et al., (Why schools matter: A cross-national comparison of curriculum and learning 2001). The curricular expectations of a nation and the actual content exposure that is delivered to students by teachers were found to be among the most salient features of schooling related to academic performance. The other feature that emerges in these studies is the importance of the teacher. The professional competence of the teacher which includes substantive knowledge regarding formal mathematics, mathematics pedagogy and general pedagogy is suggested as being significant-not just in understanding cross-national differences but also in other studies as well (Hill et al. in Am Educ Res J 42(2):371-406, 2005). Mathematics Teaching in the 21st Century (MT21) is a small, six-country study that collected data on future lower secondary teachers in their last year of preparation. One of the findings noted in the first report of that study was that the opportunities future teachers experienced as part of their formal education varied across the six countries (Schmidt et al. in The preparation gap: Teacher education for middle school mathematics in six countries, 2007). This

The study ''Mathematics Teaching in the 21st Century (MT21)'' focuses beyond others on the measurement of teachers' general pedagogical knowledge (GPK). GPK is regarded as a latent construct embedded in a larger theory of teachers' professional competence. It is laid out how GPK was defined and operationalized. As part of an international comparison GPK was measured with several complex vignettes. In the present paper, the results of future mathematics teachers' knowledge from four countries (Germany, South Korea, Taiwan, and the US) with very different teacher-education systems are presented. Significant and relevant differences between the four countries as well as between future teachers at the beginning and at the end of teacher education were found. The results are discussed with reference to cultural discourses about teacher education.