This study investigated American and Korean teachers’ conceptions of effective teachers. Specifically, the study compared the conceptual framework used by Korean and American teachers to organize selected teaching process variables. The study was based on a teacher decision making model offered by Shavelson(l983). The hypothesis was that American and Korean teachers differed meaningfully in the conceptual pattern that related teaching process variables to effective teaching. Effective teaching was understood in this study to mean teaching which resulted in high student achievement. Specific hypotheses as to how these patterns would differ between countries were developed from an analysis of the differences between American and Korean schools in curriculum decision making, social role expectation of teachers, class size, and level of school resource. Conceptions of effective teaching were described by mapping the relationships among eleven process variables using a metric-based multidimensional scaling technique (Galileo). The eleven process variables were selected from previous process-product research as being those variables consistently related to high student achievement. One hundred sixty-one teachers of public elementary school in New York State (outside of New York city) and 216 Korean teachers of public elementary school in Seoul city, Incheon city, and Kyungki province participated in this study by returning the completed questionnaire. The questionnaire collected respondents’ ratio judgments of the difference between the concepts within each paired comparison. The paired comparison were developed from all possible combinations of eleven process variables and two referent concepts (‘effective teaching’ and ‘me’). The Gilileo multidimensional scaling technique was used to analyze the data and to map the relationship between concepts for each teacher group. Korean and American teachers' conceptions of how the process variables were related to effective teaching within this multidimensional framework were compared using these conceptual maps. Meaningful differences in teachers’ conceptions between the two nations were found. Clarity of presentation, questioning, pacing of instruction, teacher-student rapport, fair grading, corrective feedback, allocating practice time, and teacher enthusiasm appeared to be more closely related to effective teaching for American than for Korean teachers. On the other hand, availability of materials was found to be more closely related to effective teaching for Korean than for American teachers. Greater dissonance between conceptions of effective teaching and predisposition to act in that way was found in Korean than in American teachers’ conceptions of effective teaching. For both group of teachers, teacher enthusiasm, teacher-student rapport, and clarity of presentation were more closely related to effective teaching than other behaviors. For American teachers, fair grading and availability of materials were farther from effective teaching than other behaviors. For Korean teachers, fair grading, pacing of instruction, allocating practice time, and corrective feedback were father from effective teaching than other variables. Overall, it appeared that the eleven teaching process variables used in this study were more appropriate for describing American teachers’ conceptions of effective teaching than those Korean teachers' conceptions.