Comparing Pedagogical Content Knowledge Across Fundamental Concepts of Electrostatics: A Case of Three Pre-service Teachers

Abstract

It has recently been suggested that pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) has a concept-specific nature, beyond the topic-specific level of PCK. This paper reports a case study of three pre-service teachers' reported PCK about three fundamental concepts within the topic of electrostatics, namely electrostatic force, electric field and electric field strength. The aim of the study was to compare the quality of the PCK of each of the individual participants across these fundamental concepts. Data was collected using a content representation tool and a lesson planning form prescribed by the participants' teacher training institution. A topic-specific PCK model was adopted as the framework for this study. The model asserts that the content of a particular topic is transformed for instruction through five components, namely learners' prior knowledge, curricular saliency, what is difficult to teach, representations including analogies and conceptual teaching strategies. Guided by the model, we designed a rubric to assess the concept-specific PCK of the participants on a four-point scale. The results of the study indicated that the PCK of the participants varied across the fundamental concepts of electrostatics, with each participant reporting better PCK for a different concept. The results of the study imply that describing PCK at concept level is appropriate and recommend that PCK should be strengthened at concept level during teacher training to ensure that it develops across all of the concepts within a topic.

Exploring dynamic pedagogical content knowledge across fundamental concepts of electrostatics

“…The results of the present study, summarized in Table 1, indicate that the scores allocated for teachers' dynamic PCK indeed varied across the big ideas of electrostatics. The present results therefore support findings of an earlier study that focused on static PCK (Mazibe et al, 2020). In particular, the results suggest that enacted PCK also varies across fundamental concepts of topics, not necessarily electrostatics.…”

“…In the present study, the fundamental concepts of electrostatic (electrostatic force, electric field, and electric field strength) are regarded as the big ideas of the topic, and we assume that the quality of teachers' PCK for teaching this topic may vary across the concepts. Previously, we have found a variation in teachers' static PCK across the same fundamental concepts (Mazibe et al, 2020). However, we understand that static PCK is not a true reflection of dynamic PCK (Chan & Hume, 2019).…”