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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.

We examined the interactions among pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) components of novice and experienced chemistry teachers in teaching reaction rate and chemical equilibrium topics in this qualitative multiple-case design study. For this aim, three chemistry teachers who had different levels of teaching experience in chemistry teaching were selected through a process of purposeful sampling. Multiple types of data were gathered through more than two months. In order to collect and triangulate data, a card-sorting activity, a Content Representation (CoRe) tool, semi-structured interviews, observation of instruction, and field notes were utilized. Data were analyzed through three approaches: in-depth analysis of explicit PCK, the enumerative approach, and constant comparative methods. The results revealed eight characteristics of the interactions of the PCK components: (a) the novice teacher's orientations towards science, in contrast to the experienced teachers’, were more broad and non-specific, which impeded the interactions among the components, (b) the interplay of the PCK components was idiosyncratic and topic specific, (c) the novice teacher's PCK maps were fragmented while the experienced teachers’ PCK maps were integrated, (d) the experienced teachers, in contrast to the novice teacher, interacted more than two PCK components in most of their teaching fragments, (e) knowledge of learner, knowledge of curriculum and knowledge of instructional strategies were central in the interplays of all teacher maps, (f) the experienced teachers were more successful than the novice teacher in translating their knowledge into practice in terms of the integration among PCK components, (g) teacher self-efficacy appeared to play a role in their use of PCK components and constructing interactions among them, and (h) all teachers taught the same topics with similar lesson plans and the same instructional materials; however, they differed in terms of how they connect the PCK components. Implications and suggestions for teacher education and science education research are presented.

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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.