Results from the Teacher Knowledge Survey

Executive summary

The OECD Teacher Knowledge Survey (TKS) was administered as part of the Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) for the first time in 2024, with eight participating countries: Chile, Croatia, Morocco, Poland, Portugal, Saudi Arabia, South Africa and the United States. It is the first large-scale international assessment of general pedagogical knowledge (GPK) administered to nationally representative samples of teachers. The collection of data on an objective measure of (one element of) teachers’ professional competencies marks a significant step for TALIS, complementing the historic focus on self-reported data.

Results from TKS 2024 shed some much-needed light on the nature of teachers’ knowledge base and how it can be developed. Crucially, TKS highlights the value of GPK for both teacher and student outcomes. The findings have important implications for teacher education, professional development, and allocation. These results emphasize that teachers are trained professionals who have specific knowledge that others do not.

Supporting student learning

There is a strong, positive correlation between countries’ average GPK scores in TKS 2024 and average 15-year-old students’ performance in the PISA 2022 mathematics and reading assessment. Certainly, this finding is only based on results from the seven countries who participated in both studies, and correlation does not imply causation. However, the results suggest that teachers’ knowledge of pedagogy may be associated with more effective teaching and observable differences in students’ outcomes.

TKS shows that teachers with more GPK spend more time on actual teaching and learning and less time on classroom discipline, which might partly explain the link between GPK and student outcomes. In Morocco and Saudi Arabia, increases of one standard deviation in GPK are associated with 16 and 22 percent increases in the share of class time spent on teaching and learning. Meanwhile, more knowledgeable teachers spend less time on keeping order in all countries except Poland and South Africa.

Tailoring teaching practices

GPK is linked to teachers’ choice of relevant teaching approaches that are adapted to students’ needs. Teachers with more GPK are more likely to “always” consider students’ prior knowledge and needs in lesson-planning in most countries. They are also more likely to “always” change their way of explaining topics and tasks when a student does not understand them in half of the participating countries. Meanwhile, GPK is often negatively associated with “always” pointing students to different learning materials depending on their needs. This suggests that other forms of differentiation might be preferred for use on a frequent basis, perhaps for reasons of efficiency.

GPK may also guide teachers in how to consolidate learning and support cognitive activation, for deep conceptual understanding and problem-solving skills. With more GPK, teachers are less likely to “always” let students practise similar tasks (in four countries) and more likely to “always” select tasks that gradually increase in difficulty (in three countries). In most participating countries, teachers with more GPK are less likely to “always” focus on cognitive activation, for example by presenting tasks for which there is no obvious solution. These findings suggest that teachers with more GPK might be more discerning in planning and pacing tasks to provide an increasing level of challenge in students’ learning.

Protecting teachers from stress

TKS demonstrates that GPK can be a powerful resource for teachers in navigating the demands of their profession. By supporting teachers in a range of tasks, GPK could help them manage potentially stressful aspects of their work, such as workload, student behaviour, accountability, diverse learning needs, keeping up with reforms, and professional growth. Each source of stress was less likely to be reported by teachers with more GPK in at least half of participating countries. Given the negative impact of stress on well-being and job satisfaction, these results have important implications for policymakers looking to retain teachers and help them thrive.

Variation in knowledge is substantial but not always systematic

Teachers’ GPK varies substantially between and within countries. Average scores range from 274 points in Portugal to 218 points in Saudi Arabia, based on a scale centred around an international average of 250 points and an international standard deviation of 50 points (pooling teachers from all participating countries and adjusting sampling weights so that each country contribute equally irrespective of their size). But differences between teachers within the same country are often larger than cross-country ones. Performance gaps between high-performing and low-performing teachers are widest in the United States, where 175 points separate teachers at the top and bottom 10 per cent of the GPK distribution. This gap is lowest in Morocco, at 51 points.

The highest-scoring teachers in each country appear to be clustered in certain schools, which implies that students may not have equal access to the most knowledgeable teachers. Clustering seems to be most prevalent in South Africa, where 24% of teachers would need to move schools for the highest-scoring teachers to be evenly distributed.

At the same time, GPK varies more within schools than between them, implying that students in different schools are exposed to teachers with similar average levels of GPK. Furthermore, teachers’ GPK does not appear to be systematically associated with schools’ location, governance type, or composition of the student body. Only in South Africa do systematic differences emerge, where teachers in urban schools, private schools, and schools with a lower intake of disadvantaged students tend to have more GPK.

Supporting knowledge development

For many teachers, initial teacher education (ITE) is when they first start to build their GPK. TKS shows that GPK is often related to teachers’ level of education and the type of ITE they attended. Teachers with a bachelor’s degree, for example, consistently have more GPK than teachers with a lower level of qualification. Meanwhile, teachers who completed a regular ITE programme often tend to perform better on the GPK assessment than those who completed programmes focusing on subject-specific content only.

Teachers’ knowledge of general pedagogy continues to develop throughout their careers. TKS suggests that teacher collaboration is one resource that could support teachers’ GPK once they start working. For example, teachers are likely to have more GPK when they regularly exchange teaching materials with their colleagues in most countries, which could reflect GPK gained from shared discussions and resources.