Analysing Science Teachers’ Pedagogical Content Knowledge: Digging into the Data

Description and Aim

Good science teaching requires considerably more than the delivery of information to students for later reproduction. Effective science teachers possess specialized knowledge about their subject matter and how to teach it in order to support student understanding. This form of teacher knowledge, referred to as Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK), is built up over time, through experiences of teaching specific content topics, using particular teaching approaches, to particular learners and in particular contexts. Understanding how such knowledge develops and how its development might be successfully supported has been an important focus of science education research internationally, over the past 25 years.

This workshop follows up on the PCK Summit held in Colorado Springs, 2012. Whereas the Colorado Springs summit focused on the concept of pedagogical content knowledge, resulting in a consensus model, at this next meeting in the Lorentz Center we want to focus on the instruments used in PCK studies, the data that were collected with these instruments, and the procedures used to infer PCK from these data. Strengths and weaknesses of different instruments and procedures of PCK data collection and analysis will be discussed.

The aim of the workshop is that participants develop a joint understanding of how PCK can be studied for specific purposes, and which methods of data collection and analysis are valid for these purposes.”?