Developing pre-service science teachers’ pedagogical content knowledge by using training program

Abstract

A training program was developed for enhancing pre-service science teachers’ pedagogical content knowledge (PCK). The pre-service science teachers are able to: understand science curriculum, knowledge of assessment in science, knowledge of students’ understanding of science, instructional strategies and orientations towards science teaching, which is conceptualized as PCK [5]. This study examined the preservice science teachers’ understandings and their practices which include five pre-service science teachers’ PCK. In this study, the participants demonstrated their PCK through the process of the training program by writing content representations (CoRes), preparing the lesson plans, micro-teaching, and actual teaching respectively. All pre-service science teachers’ performs were collected by classroom observations. Then, they were interviewed. The results showed that the pre-service science teachers progressively developed knowledge components of PCK. Micro-teaching is the key activities for developing PCK. However, they had some difficulties in their classroom teaching. They required of sufficient ability to design appropriate instructional strategies and assessment activities for teaching. Blending content and pedagogy is also a matter of great concern. The implication of this study was that science educators can enhance pre-service science teachers’ PCK by fostering their better understandings of the instructional strategies, assessment activities and blending between content and pedagogy in their classroom.