The Relationship between Secondary School Mathematics Teachers’ Professional Competence and Instructional Quality: Empirical Findings from A Pilot Study in China

In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in the investigation of the relationship between teachers’ professional competence and instructional quality in Western context. However, very little empirical evidence on the relationship between these two constructs is available from non-Western contexts. With the adoption of the theoretical framework developed in TEDS-M, this paper examines this relationship within the Chinese context based on a pilot study involving 116 in-service mathematics teachers. The results suggest that the in-service mathematics teachers tended to endorse both the dynamic and static aspects of mathematics and held strong constructivist beliefs, other than traditional beliefs. Both correlation analysis and regression analysis results suggest the existence of a very weak association between in-service mathematics teachers’ knowledge and their self-reported instructional quality. In contrast, the in-service mathematics teachers’ beliefs about the nature of mathematics and constructivist beliefs were found to strongly correlate with their instructional quality. Findings as such suggest the necessity to include situation-specific skills for a fuller understanding of the relationship between teachers’ professional competence and their instructional quality within the Chinese context.