Re Examining Pedagogical Content Knowledge In Science Education

Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK) has been adapted, adopted, and taken up in a diversity of ways in science education since the concept was introduced in the mid-1980s. Now that it is so well embedded within the language of teaching and learning, research and knowledge about the construct needs to be more useable and applicable to the work of science teachers, especially so in these times when standards and other measures are being used to define their knowledge, skills, and abilities. Re-examining Pedagogical Content Knowledge in Science Education is organized around three themes: Re-examining PCK: Issues, ideas and development; Research developments and trajectories; Emerging themes in PCK research. Featuring the most up-to-date work from leading PCK scholars in science education across the globe, this volume maps where PCK has been, where it is going, and how it now informs and enhances knowledge of science teachers’ professional knowledge. It illustrates how the PCK research agenda has developed and can make a difference to teachers’ practice and students’ learning of science.

This ambitious text is the first of its kind to summarize the theory, research, and practice related to pedagogical content knowledge. The audience is provided with a functional understanding of the basic tenets of the construct as well as its applications to research on science teacher education and the development of science teacher education programs.

Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK) has been adapted, adopted, and taken up in a diversity of ways in science education since the concept was introduced in the mid-1980s. Now that it is so well embedded within the language of teaching and learning, research and knowledge about the construct needs to be more useable and applicable to the work of science teachers, especially so in these times when standards and other measures are being used to define their knowledge, skills, and abilities. Re-examining Pedagogical Content Knowledge in Science Education is organized around three themes: Re-examining PCK: Issues, ideas and development; Research developments and trajectories; Emerging themes in PCK research. Featuring the most up-to-date work from leading PCK scholars in science education across the globe, this volume maps where PCK has been, where it is going, and how it now informs and enhances knowledge of science teachers’ professional knowledge. It illustrates how the PCK research agenda has developed and can make a difference to teachers’ practice and students’ learning of science.

There has been a growing interest in the notion of a scholarship of teaching. Such scholarship is displayed through a teacher’s grasp of, and response to, the relationships between knowledge of content, teaching and learning in ways that attest to practice as being complex and interwoven. Yet attempting to capture teachers’ professional knowledge is difficult because the critical links between practice and knowledge, for many teachers, is tacit. Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK) offers one way of capturing, articulating and portraying an aspect of the scholarship of teaching and, in this case, the scholarship of science teaching. The research underpinning the approach developed by Loughran, Berry and Mulhall offers access to the development of the professional knowledge of science teaching in a form that offers new ways of sharing and disseminating this knowledge. Through this Resource Folio approach (comprising CoRe and PaP-eRs) a recognition of the value of the specialist knowledge and skills of science teaching is not only highlighted, but also enhanced. The CoRe and PaP-eRs methodology offers an exciting new way of capturing and portraying science teachers’ pedagogical content knowledge so that it might be better understood and valued within the profession. This book is a concrete example of the nature of scholarship in science teaching that is meaningful, useful and immediately applicable in the work of all science teachers (preservice, in-service and science teacher educators). It is an excellent resource for science teachers as well as a guiding text for teacher education.

This volume represents both recent research in pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM), as well as emerging innovations in how PCK is applied in practice. The notion of “research to practice” is critical to validating how effectively PCK works within the clinic and how it can be used to improve STEM learning. ​As the need for more effective educational approaches in STEM grows, the importance of developing, identifying, and validating effective practices and practitioner competencies are needed. This book covers a wide range of topics in PCK in different school levels (middle school, college teacher training, teacher professional development), and different environments (museums, rural). The contributors believe that vital to successful STEM education practice is recognition that STEM domains require both specialized domain knowledge as well as specialized pedagogical approaches. The authors of this work were chosen because of their extensive fieldwork in PCK research and practice, making this volume valuable to furthering how PCK is used to enlighten the understanding of learning, as well as providing practical instruction. This text helps STEM practitioners, researchers, and decision-makers further their interest in more effective STEM education practice, and raises new questions about STEM learning.

This book enhances readers’ understanding of science teachers’ professional knowledge, and illustrates how the Pedagogical Content Knowledge research agenda can make a difference in teachers’ practices and how students learn science. Importantly, it offers an updated international perspective on the evolving nature of Pedagogical Content Knowledge and how it is shaping research and teacher education agendas for science teaching. The first few chapters background and introduce a new model known as the Refined Consensus Model (RCM) of Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK) in science education, and clarify and demonstrate its use in research and teacher education and practice. Subsequent chapters show how this new consensus model of PCK in science education is strongly connected with empirical data of varying nature, contains a tailored language to describe the nature of PCK in science education, and can be used as a framework for illuminating past studies and informing the design of future PCK studies in science education. By presenting and discussing the RCM of PCK within a variety of science education contexts, the book makes the model significantly more applicable to teachers’ work.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Informatics in Schools: Situation, Evolution, and Perspectives, ISSEP 2016, held in Münster, Germany, in October 2015. The 17 full papers presented together with 1 invited talk were carefully reviewed and selected from 50 submissions. The focus of the conference was on following topics: sustainable education in informatics for pupils of all ages; connecting informatics lessons to the students’ everyday lives; teacher education in informatics or computer science; and research on informatics or computer science in schools (empirical/qualitative/quantitative/theory building/research methods/comparative studies/transferability of methods and results from other disciplines).

There has been a growing interest in the notion of a scholarship of teaching. Such scholarship is displayed through a teacher’s grasp of, and response to, the relationships between knowledge of content, teaching and learning in ways that attest to practice as being complex and interwoven. Yet attempting to capture teachers’ professional knowledge is difficult because the critical links between practice and knowledge, for many teachers, is tacit.