Abstract: Numerous research studies have shown that the quality of teachers is the single important school-level contributor to student achievement. This study aims to investigate teachers’ professional development experience and its relationship with their readiness to teach mathematics in Chinese Taipei, Hong Kong SAR, Japan, Korea, and Singapore. The data were taken from TIMSS 2007 at eighth grade level. Responses of mathematics teachers to the questionnaires pertaining to their highest education level, educational emphasis on mathematics and teaching, participation in professional development in mathematics, collaboration among colleagues, and readiness to teach the TIMSS curriculum topics are the focus of the analysis. The results show that teachers’ readiness was influenced by many factors that functioned interactively. While some practices were consistently found to be helpful in enhancing teachers’ readiness (e.g., receiving training in both Math/Science and education, participation of professional development activities related to pedagogy/instruction), some functioned differently across education systems (e.g., length of teaching experience, observation of others’ lessons and/or being observed).

Key words: TIMSS 2007; Teacher development; Teacher readiness; Teacher quality; Chinese Taipei, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, Singapore