AN EXPLORATION ON THE ASSOCIATION RULES OF SECONDARY EDUCATION TEACHER QUALIFICATION EXAMINATION IN TAIWAN

Since 1994, Taiwan has amended the Teacher Education Act to establish a "diversified, reserve, and self-funded" system, initiating a diversified teacher training framework.The most recent full revision of the Teacher Education Act occurred in 2019, which adjusted the sequence of the teacher qualification examination and the educational internship.Under the new system, candidates must first pass the teacher qualification examination and obtain a teacher qualification certificate before proceeding to the internship stage.The internship lasts for six months, and only after successfully passing the internship evaluation can candidates officially obtain a teaching certificate and qualify to teach.This highlights that the teaching certificate serves as a critical threshold to determine whether a teacher meets the required professional competency standards.This study focuses on secondary education teacher candidates who participated in the teacher qualification examination between 2016 and March or April 2022, as well as those with various background variables who completed their educational internships from 2015 to January 2022.Using data mining techniques for 23,368 persons, the research aimed to establish the best model for analyzing, predicting, and exploring the association rules and passing rates for teacher candidates based on different background variables and sources of teacher training.The findings revealed that the key association rules and significant indicators for secondary education teacher candidates were: gender (female), age (20-24 years old), recent graduates, qualification exam passed, exam-before-internship sequence, and public-school attributes.These factors were identified as crucial association rules and predictors of success in the teacher qualification examination.