The Influence of Teachers’ Knowledge on Student Learning in Middle School Physical Science Classrooms

Abstract

This study examines the relationship between teacher knowledge and student learning for 9,556 students of 181 middle school physical science teachers. Assessment instruments based on the National Science Education Standards with 20 items in common were administered several times during the school year to both students and their teachers. For items that had a very popular wrong answer, the teachers who could identify this misconception had larger classroom gains, much larger than if the teachers knew only the correct answer. On items on which students did not exhibit misconceptions, teacher subject matter knowledge alone accounted for higher student gains. This finding suggests that a teacher’s ability to identify students’ most common wrong answer on multiple-choice items, a form of pedagogical content knowledge, is an additional measure of science teacher competence.

Practice‐Based Measures of Elementary Science Teachers' Content Knowledge for Teaching: Initial Item Development and Validity Evidence

“…The practice-based CKT assessments that measure the knowledge used in teaching science focus mainly on science teachers' pedagogical content knowledge (Lee, Brown, Luft, & Roehrig, 2007) and involve teachers in tasks that require substantial time to administer and score, such as analyzing video-recorded episodes of practice (Roth et al, 2011), participating in think-aloud or cognitive interviews (Henze & van Driel, 2015;Park & Suh, 2015), conducting classroom observations (Park & Oliver, 2008;Park & Suh, 2015), or documenting their pedagogical content knowledge for particular science topics using graphic organizers (Bertram & Loughran, 2012;Loughran, Mulhall, & Berry, 2004). To date, only a few notable efforts have developed large-scale, practice-based assessment items to measure the professional knowledge specialized to science teaching (Sadler, Sonnert, Coyle, Cook-Smith, & Miller, 2013;Smith & Taylor, 2010).…”

“…The practice-based CKT assessments that measure the knowledge used in teaching science focus mainly on science teachers' pedagogical content knowledge (Lee, Brown, Luft, & Roehrig, 2007) and involve teachers in tasks that require substantial time to administer and score, such as analyzing video-recorded episodes of practice (Roth et al, 2011), participating in think-aloud or cognitive interviews (Henze & van Driel, 2015;Park & Suh, 2015), conducting classroom observations (Park & Oliver, 2008;Park & Suh, 2015), or documenting their pedagogical content knowledge for particular science topics using graphic organizers (Bertram & Loughran, 2012;Loughran, Mulhall, & Berry, 2004). To date, only a few notable efforts have developed large-scale, practice-based assessment items to measure the professional knowledge specialized to science teaching (Sadler, Sonnert, Coyle, Cook-Smith, & Miller, 2013;Smith & Taylor, 2010).We think that this tasks of teaching framework offers a more focused conceptualization of the measurable aspects of the CKT science construct, which addresses some of the concerns in the field about the need for increased clarity regarding the nature of CKT science and what is being measured (Abell, 2008;Gess-Newsome, 1999;van Driel, Verloop, & de Vos, 1998). In our work, we focus on the conceptual challenges that elementary science teachers encounter in the work of teaching science and on developing practice-based assessment items to measure the CKT that is embedded within these recurrent tasks of teaching.…”

Using doubly latent multilevel analysis to elucidate relationships between science teachers’ professional knowledge and students’ performance

“…In addition, PCK helps the teacher to decide which specific support is necessary to enable students to deal with a given science concept and to survey prior knowledge, learning gains, and learning difficulties (Ball et al, 2001;Magnusson et al, 1999). The impact of teachers' PCK on students' performance is supported by empirical studies related to mathematics (Baumert et al, 2010;Fennema et al, 1996) and physics (Lange et al, 2015;Sadler et al, 2013).…”

“…Despite this broad theoretical base, empirical studies related to science and different other school subjects show no consensus concerning the relationship between teachers' CK and students' performance. Some scholars did find an effect of CK on students' science performance (Ohle, Fischer, & Kauertz, 2011;Sadler et al, 2013) or mathematics performance (Baumert et al, 2010;Hill, Rowan, & Ball, 2005;Rowan et al, 1997). On the contrary, other studies did not find an effect of CK on students' science performance (Lange et al, 2015) or students' reading performance (Carlisle, Correnti, Phelps, & Zeng, 2009).…”

“…Nevertheless, there is no consensus on which domain of content-related professional knowledge most heavily impacts students' science performance (e.g. Lange et al, 2015;Sadler, Sonnert, Coyle, Cook-Smith, & Miller, 2013). This study aims to contribute to the clarification of this problem.…”