Pedagogical knowledge structures in prospective teachers: relationships to performance in a teaching methodology course.

Abstract

The purpose of the article is to describe the relationships of prospective teachers' pedagogical knowledge structures to performance in a physical education teaching methods class. The Pathfinder network scaling algorithm was used to elicit knowledge structures prior to and after the prospective teachers completed the class. The findings indicated that their knowledge of key pedagogical concepts was more coherent and corresponded more closely to the instructor's following the courses. Student measures of correspondence and coherence before the class were not significantly correlated with course performance; however, following the class, correlations between these measures and course performance were significant. Additionally, university grade point average (GPA) was highly related to course performance variables and knowledge measures, whereas American College Test (ACT) scores were not. A follow-up investigation of a subset of students indicated that key pedagogical concepts were retained over a 6-month period of time. However, performance on a semantic classification task provided little evidence that students with knowledge structures similar to that of the instructor organized knowledge at a more semantic level than students who were less similar. Future directions for the study of pedagogical knowledge acquisition in physical education are discussed.