Results from the Teacher Knowledge Survey

Reader’s guide

How was the Teacher Knowledge Survey implemented?

The Teacher Knowledge Survey (TKS) is a module within the Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS). The TALIS Governing Board (TGB) leads TALIS. It is composed of a representative from each country and territory that participates in the survey. The TGB oversees the OECD Secretariat, which in turn manages a consortium of international actors that together develop and implement TALIS (and TKS).

A diverse group of education experts, under the coordination of the consortium and the OECD Secretariat and the oversight of the TGB, drafted the questions that appeared in TALIS and TKS. All questions were reviewed and approved by the TGB. Each question was translated into the national languages of every participating country and territory. The questions were tested twice to verify their translations and their functioning.

TKS was administered to lower secondary education teachers (ISCED level 2).

Which countries and territories participated in TKS?

Eight countries participated in TKS 2024: Chile, Croatia, Morocco, Poland, Portugal, Saudi Arabia, South Africa and the United States.

Low participation rates

Caution is advised when interpreting estimates for countries that did not meet the TALIS technical standards with respect to participation rates due to higher risk of non-response bias. See Annex C for more details.

Reporting conventions

Teachers

This report uses “teachers” as shorthand for the TKS target population of lower secondary (ISCED level 2) teachers.

This report refers to findings that are based on responses of teachers as a “share of teachers”, “percentage of teachers”, etc. For example, 35% of teachers in an education system attended a regular teacher education or training programme.

Principals

Because TKS was implemented in the same schools sampled for the Core TALIS 2024 survey (OECD, 2025[1]), this report uses sometimes information from the answers given by school principals about their schools. This report uses “principals” as shorthand for the TALIS target population of lower secondary (ISCED level 2) principals. Principals provided information on their schools’ characteristics and their own work and working conditions by completing a principal questionnaire. Responses from principals are usually treated in this publication as attributes of the teachers’ personal factors, working conditions, practices, etc. In which case, principals’ answers are analysed at the teacher level and weighted by teacher weights.

Where a principal provided data linked to the teachers at that school (i.e. data provided by one principal applies to several teachers, such as the size of the school), this report refers to findings as a “share of teachers in schools”, a “percentage of teachers in schools”, etc. For example, 35% of teachers in privately managed schools in an education system enjoy teaching.

Self-reported data

TKS included an assessment of teachers’ general pedagogical knowledge (GPK) and an accompanying contextual questionnaire. While GPK scores can be considered an “objective” measure of teachers’ proficiency in GPK, all other variables analysed in this report are based on self-reports from teachers and principals. They often represent their opinions, perceptions, beliefs and accounts of their activities. As with any self-reported data, this information is subjective and may, therefore, differ from data collected through other means (e.g. administrative data or video observations). The same is true of principals’ reports about school characteristics and practices, which may differ from descriptions provided by administrative data at a national or local government level.

While self-reported data allow respondents to share their beliefs and perceptions, there are also limitations when interpreting findings based on self-reported information.

• Cultural response patterns: Social and cultural backgrounds might systematically affect how individuals respond to questions (e.g. tending to respond in moderate or extreme ways) (van de Vijver and Leung, 1997[2]).

• Social desirability bias: Individuals respond in ways that they think are viewed favourably but do not represent their true beliefs or actions (Krumpal, 2011[3]).

• Validity concerns: Respondents might have to remember something that occurred a long time in the past, or their interpretation of a question is not consistent (e.g. what one person believes to be “critical thinking” could be different from another person’s opinion).

As a result, direct comparisons across countries using self-reported measures warrant caution as they can be misleading.

Cultural or contextual factors can in principle also influence answers to the GPK assessment question. The answers to the GPK assessment items were thoroughly analysed to ensure comparability across countries. More details on this analysis can be found in Annex A and in OECD (forthcoming[4]).

International averages

The OECD and TKS averages correspond to the arithmetic mean of the respective country estimates. They are calculated for most indicators presented in this report. Four countries participating in TKS are included in the OECD average: Chile, Poland, Portugal and the United States. The TKS average includes all eight participating countries.

Throughout the report, “on average” is often used as a shorthand for “on average across OECD countries participating in TKS”. In each chapter, this is normally clarified at the first occurrence. For example: ”On average among the four OECD countries participating in TKS (henceforth, “on average”)”

In figures and tables, the number of education systems included in an international average is indicated next to that average:

• OECD average-4: arithmetic average based on ISCED level 2 teacher or principal data across the four OECD countries participating in TKS.

• TKS average-8: arithmetic average based on ISCED level 2 teacher data across the eight countries participating in TKS.

Glossary

• Novice teacher: Teacher with up to five years of teaching experience.

• Experienced teacher: Teacher with more than ten years of teaching experience.

• Second-career teacher: Teacher with at least ten years of work experience in non-education roles for whom teaching was not a first career choice.

• Advantaged school: School with 10% or fewer students from socio-economically disadvantaged homes (those that lack the basic necessities or advantages of life, such as adequate housing, nutrition or medical care).

• Disadvantaged school: School with more than 30% of students from socio-economically disadvantaged homes (those that lack the basic necessities or advantages of life, such as adequate housing, nutrition or medical care).

• Urban school: School located in a community with a population of over 100 000 people.

• Rural school: School located in rural area or village (with a population of up to 3 000 people). To note, in some countries and territories, schools labelled as rural may actually be located in urbanised villages.

• Publicly managed (or public) school: School whose principal reported that it is managed by a public education authority, government agency, municipality or governing board appointed by government or elected by public franchise. To note, a publicly managed school may not necessarily be publicly funded.

• Privately managed (or private) school: School whose principal reported that it is managed by a non‑governmental organisation (e.g. a church, trade union, business or other private institution). To note, a privately managed school may not necessarily be privately funded.

• Students with special education needs: Students for whom a special education need has been formally identified.

• Target class: Lessons taught over the week preceding the survey to a class randomly selected from teachers’ current weekly timetables.

Abbreviations

Dif.	Difference
DIF	Differential Item Functioning
GPK	General pedagogical knowledge
ICT	Information and communication technology
IRT	Item Response Theory
ISCED	International Standard Classification of Education
ITE	Initial teacher education
OTL	Opportunities to learn
PISA	Programme for International Student Assessment
S.D.	Standard deviation
S.E.	Standard error
%pt. dif.	Percentage point difference

Technical information

Causality

The design of TKS does not allow to establish causal relationships between two variables. All analysis presented in this report should be interpreted as uncovering the presence (or absence) of statistical association, i.e. whether or not variations in one variable (for instance, teachers’ participation in professional development) is systematically associated to variation in another variable (for instance, self‑efficacy in teaching). It is not possible, however, to assess causality between two variables, i.e. whether making teachers participate in professional development, all other things being kept equal, would cause a change in self-efficacy.

Data underlying the figures

In the tables containing the data reported in figures, four symbols are used to denote non-reported estimates:

• a: The category does not apply to the country/territory concerned, data were not collected by the country/territory, or there was no observation in the sample.

• c: There are too few observations to provide reliable estimates and/or to ensure the confidentiality of respondents (i.e. there are fewer than 30 teachers or 10 schools/principals with valid data; and/or the item non-response rate [i.e. ratio of missing or invalid responses to the number of participants for whom the question was applicable] is above 50%).

• w: Data were withdrawn or were not collected at the request of the country/territory concerned.

Rounding figures

Because of rounding, some figures in tables may not add up exactly to the totals. Totals, differences and averages are always calculated on the basis of exact numbers and are rounded only after calculation.

All standard errors in this publication have been rounded to one, two or three decimal places. Where the value 0.0, 0.00 or 0.000 is shown, this does not imply that the standard error is zero, but that it is smaller than 0.05, 0.005 or 0.0005 respectively.

Focusing on statistically significant differences

For all results presented and commented in this report (statistics, differences between countries or groups of teachers, regression coefficients), statistical tests were conducted to assess whether the results are statistically different from zero at the α=0.05 significance level. Statistically significant results are denoted by using bold font in tables and filled shapes in figures. In figures where multiple analysis are presented, normally only the name of countries for which the results are statistically significant are displayed. See Annex D for further information.

Further technical documentation

For further information on TKS and TALIS documentation, instruments and methodology, see the TALIS 2024 Technical Report (OECD, forthcoming[4]), the TALIS initial report (OECD, 2025[1]) and the TALIS 2024 User Guide (OECD, forthcoming[5]).

This report uses the OECD StatLinks service. All tables and charts are assigned a URL leading to a corresponding Excel^TM workbook containing the underlying data. These URLs are stable and will remain unchanged over time. In addition, readers of the e-books will be able to click directly on these links and the workbook will open in a separate window if their Internet browser is open and running.

Content of this report

This report is organised in the following way:

• Introduction provides an overview of the Teacher Knowledge Survey and how it assessed teachers’ General Pedagogical Knowledge (GPK).

• Chapter 1 describes the performance of teachers in the GPK assessment, shows how GPK is related to students’ and teachers’ outcomes, and how teachers with different levels of GPK are allocated across schools.

• Chapter 2 describes how GPK differs according to teachers’ socio-demographic characteristics, as well as according to their beliefs about their efficacy (self-efficacy) and their opinions about whether their initial teacher education and further professional learning (Opportunities to Learn) have prepared them on various dimension of general pedagogical knowledge.

• Chapter 3 looks at the ways in which teachers may develop their GPK through a variety of system- and school-level resources, including initial teacher education (ITE) and continuing professional learning opportunities.

• Annex A provides an overview of the development of TKS and its conceptual underpinnings.

• Annex B present summary results a survey on pathways into teaching and teachers’ professional development in TKS participating countries, conducted by the OECD Secretariat to support the analysis of the results from TKS.

• Annex C contains information about the TKS target population, the TKS samples and a summary of the adjudication outcomes.

• Annex D contains information about complex variables derived from the teacher and principal questionnaires analysed in the volume, and statistical methods used to analyse TALIS data.

• Annex E contains the full list of result tables available online.

• Annex F lists the representatives of TKS countries in the TALIS Governing Board, managers in the TKS national centres, members of the OECD Secretariat, members of the TALIS Consortium and members of TALIS and TKS expert groups that contributed to TKS 2024.

References

[3] Krumpal, I. (2011), “Determinants of social desirability bias in sensitive surveys: A literature review”, Quality and Quantity, Vol. 47/4, pp. 2025-2047, https://doi.org/10.1007/S11135-011-9640-9.

[1] OECD (2025), Results from TALIS 2024: The State of Teaching, TALIS, OECD Publishing, Paris, https://doi.org/10.1787/90df6235-en.

[4] OECD (forthcoming), TALIS 2024 Technical Report, TALIS, OECD Publishing, Paris.

[5] OECD (forthcoming), TALIS 2024 User Guide, TALIS, OECD Publishing, Paris.

[2] van de Vijver, F. and K. Leung (1997), Methods and Data Analysis for Cross-cultural Research, Sage, https://research.tilburguniversity.edu/en/publications/methods-and-data-analysis-for-cross-cultural-research (accessed on 11 June 2025).