Inspection and proposal for evaluating secondary school teacher students’ content knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge

In Taiwan, two methods are adopted to measure secondary school teacher students’ knowledge about teaching. First, teacher students’ knowledge of education gained from their teacher education is examined through the Teacher Certification examination. Second, their content knowledge (CK) and pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) are evaluated through a written inspection procedure. However, since the implementation of the Teacher Education Act 2017, each university designs and uses its own teacher education curriculum without any third party inspection. The university also issues a certificate document upon completion of the teacher education program. These series of procedures have replaced the written document inspection by a third party, resulting in the problem of monitoring the quality of teacher students’ CK and PCK. Therefore, this study approached this problem by highlighting the necessity for the Taiwanese government to intervene and examine secondary school teacher students’ CK and PCK from the following perspectives: (1) Quality assurance in teacher education through a national management system. (2) The effects of market competition and teacher selection. (3) The requirement for teachers’ CK and PCK, and (4) teacher credentials. Moreover, after considering the existing assessment technology and the teacher certification exams in other countries, we provided appropriate methods to examine secondary school teacher students’ CK and PCK.