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A country’s education system's quality is closely related to its teachers' quality. In many countries, preservice teacher education is seen as an important development field, and professionally trained teachers are expected to demonstrate superior knowledge and teaching skills (Czerniawski et al., 2018). One of the main reasons for focusing on the quality of teachers is that this can significantly influence student learning outcomes, including improving student learning of mathematics and languages, helping students to interact and achieve academically, and creating an attractive learning environment and enhancing student motivation (Bruns & Luque, 2015; Hill & Chin, 2018; Koedel et al., 2015). The positive correlation between the quality of teaching and student learning has resulted in producing high-quality teachers. It is becoming a core research and policy focus for improving and maintaining learning outcomes.
Changes to the social environment, such as the declining birth rate, aging society, internationalization, and environmental issues, have provided the planners of teacher education programs with many new challenges. In that context, it is worthwhile to determine whether beginning teachers in primary and junior/senior high schools are able to acquire sufficient professional competencies within the current teacher education process. Professional competencies are skills, knowledge, and attributes specifically valued in teaching. The abundant literature includes in-depth studies of the classroom performance of beginning teachers and how they meet teaching challenges (Heikonen et al., 2017; Jokikokko et al., 2017; Simmie et al., 2017). Nevertheless, some scholars have called for further investigations and discussions of the impact of teacher education programs on the professional competencies and teaching ability of beginning teachers (Culp & Salvador, 2021; Lynch, Krause & Douglas, 2021).
Effective teacher education programs have clear teaching objectives, with curriculum structure and content closely related to teaching practice. In other words, a good teacher education program exhibits consistency in terms of curriculum, practice, and objectives and will strengthen the link between course content and classroom experience to improve the learning outcomes of beginning teachers (Bahtaji, 2023; Sugiharto et al., 2019). However, many researchers have found that the biggest challenge facing beginning teachers is an inability to apply what they have learned in the classroom, such as failing to make connections between their knowledge and classroom teaching (Zulkifli et al., 2019), or courses being too theoretical and lacking specific teaching strategies, with the result that what is learned in teacher education programs does not help actual teaching (Buzdar et al., 2018).
A study by the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement that focused on the preparedness of teachers to teach mathematics in primary and secondary schools found that while preservice teachers in Taiwan were ahead of their counterparts in the other participating countries in terms of mathematics knowledge, they were not as good in terms of teacher training, such as in the arrangement of teacher training courses, and the relevance of the teacher training courses to the needs of primary- and secondary-school students (Tatto, 2013). After the publication of the research results, many scholars have discussed whether the training content of pre-service teachers meets the actual teaching needs (Guler & Celik, 2021; Unsworth et al., 2021). However, most of the research on beginning teachers discusses their performance in teaching and school support (Morettini, Luet & Vernon-Dotson, 2020; Aarts, Kools & Schildwacht, 2020); it needs to look back at how teacher education programs help them develop the required abilities.