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The purpose of this research was twofold. The first was to investigate the development of preservice teachers’ knowledge base for science teaching on the rate of reaction topic within the 14‐week content representation (CoRe)‐based mentoring‐enriched practicum course. In this course, CoRe design was used as a form of lesson planning and intensive educative mentoring was provided by teaching assistants. The second purpose was to identify which aspects of the practicum course contributed to preservice teachers’ development. Three preservice chemistry teachers voluntarily participated in the study. Qualitative data sources included CoRe, semistructured interviews, and reflection papers. Both inductive and deductive analyses were applied by triangulating findings from multiple data sources. Results revealed that at the end of the practicum, participants were able to successfully link content with teaching to promote student learning. Their pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) developed with its all components coherently integrated with each other. They also started to view the PCK construct as professional pedagogical knowledge. Educative mentoring with the use of an explicit and shared PCK language supported by CoRes, teaching experiences, and the observation of peers were reported as the most valuable aspects in stimulating teacher development. Implications for teachers’ professional growth and research are discussed.

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This study investigates Turkish students' (age 15 or older) interest in chemistry by analysing 1027 of their self-generated chemistry-related questions, which had been submitted to a popular science magazine. These questions were classified based on the field of interest, the cognitive level of the question, and the stimulating impetus for asking the question. In addition, gender-related patterns were noted in these three categories. Those results demonstrated that males asked overwhelmingly more questions than females in an informal setting. In general, students mostly asked questions about ''states of matter and solutions'' and ''nuclear chemistry and chemistry of the elements.'' Most of the students asked for the properties of a variable and sought to learn about factual and explanatory types of information. The driving factors that led students to ask questions were mostly non-applicative stimulus. Significant differences emerged in some categories. For example, while males were more interested in comparison and causal relationships, females were more interested in specific information about properties. Moreover, while males tended toward seeking methodological information, making predictions, asking open-ended questions, and making general requests for information, females were more interested than males in factual and explanatory types of information. The implications of students' self-generated chemistry questions for science curriculum reform and teaching are discussed in this paper.

This study combined two important frameworks-teacher self-regulation and pedagogical content knowledge (PCK)-to reveal whether they were related to each other. To fulfill this aim, researchers utilized a case-study design. Data were collected from five preservice chemistry teachers through semi-structured interviews, lesson plans in the form of content representations, and video recordings of teaching practice. Both deductive and inductive analyses were used to analyze the data. Results indicated that preservice teachers utilized different PCK components in each self-regulation phase. They were good at regulating their teaching when they had developed PCK components. Especially, a lack of subject matter knowledge accounted for ineffective self-regulation in teaching. The findings of this study imply that teacher education programs should provide meaningful opportunities to preservice teachers for improving both their self-regulation for teaching and PCK.

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