The retention of topic specific pck: a longitudinal study with beginning chemistry teachers

Abstract

<p>What evidence counts as teacher quality is a debate of continued interest to the teacher education community. Many education scholars have argued for the importance of retention of knowledge as an indicator of the quality of education acquired. This study explored the retention of the quality of planned Topic Specific Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TSPCK) in a case study of seven chemistry pre-service teachers in their final year of study towards a BEd degree. They were exposed to a TSPCK based intervention in either Organic Chemistry or Stoichiometry as a topic and subsequently followed two years later into their practice as beginning teachers. The study employed a longitudinal qualitative research design with sets of data collected at three different points: pre-intervention, post-intervention and delayed post-intervention (two years later). Data collected included a combination of completed TSPCK tools and audio-recorded stimulated recall interviews. The analysis of completed TSPCK tools entailed the use of a criterion-based rubric for shifts in the quality of planned TSPCK and the recorded interviews were analysed through content analysis. Evidence of learning during the intervention and in-practice was analysed using the qualitative in-depth analysis for developing TSPCK and the Vygotskian sociocultural theoretical framework. Findings from the first and second sets of data confirmed a gain in the quality of planned TSPCK at the end of the intervention. The findings from the second and third sets revealed the beginning teachers’ successful retention and continued growth two years in practice. Implications for teacher preparation are discussed.</p>

Teachers’ Conceptual Difficulties in Teaching Senior High School Organic Chemistry

“…The conceptual difficulties demonstrated by teachers in this study are not only limited to introduction to organic chemistry where nature, tetravalency, and hybridization of the carbon atom are introduced to students, but the IUPAC nomenclature, structural formula, functional group, and reactions of hydrocarbons, aromatics, and derivatives of hydrocarbons. This implies that teachers' conceptual difficulties in organic chemistry cut across most concepts confirming that organic chemistry is difficult (Chang & Goldsby, 2016;Childs & Sheehan, 2009;Miheso & Mavhunga, 2020;Salame et al, 2019). These teachers' difficulties in most concepts of SHS organic chemistry could be a major block to an effective transformation of the content (PCK) to students (Van Driel et al, 1998).…”

Improving Secondary School Biology Teachers’ Topic-Specific Pedagogical Content Knowledge: Evidence From Lesson Studies

“…Previous studies have compared teachers' pre-test and post-test scores on CoRes (Miheso & Mavhunga, 2020;Ndlovu & Malcolm, 2022). However, this study compared individual teachers' scores on CoRes with the scores of the same teachers in a collectively constructed CoRe during a lesson study.…”

Factors contributing to teachers’ conceptual difficulties in teaching high school organic chemistry

“…One of the components of senior high school chemistry is organic chemistry. Organic chemistry is a chemistry of the structure, properties, reactions of compounds containing carbon (Sibomana et al, 2021) and the preparation of carbon-containing compounds (Chang & Goldsby, 2016;Miheso & Mavhunga, 2020), except oxides of carbon (CO2 and CO), carbonates (𝐶𝑂 3 2 − ), hydrogen carbonate (𝐻𝐶𝑂 3 − ), carbides (𝐶 4 − ), and cyanides (𝐶𝑁 − ). In simple terms, organic chemistry is the chemistry of hydrocarbons and their derivatives (Omwirhiren & Ubanwa, 2016).…”

“…From literature on chemistry, the teaching and learning of organic chemistry is difficult (Miheso & Mavhunga, 2020;Sana & Adhikary, 2017). The difficulties stem from the fact that it is abstract (Taber, 2002).…”