Repositioning Pedagogical Content Knowledge in Teachers' Knowledge for Teaching Science

This book enhances readers’ understanding of science teachers’ professional knowledge, and illustrates how the Pedagogical Content Knowledge research agenda can make a difference in teachers’ practices and how students learn science. Importantly, it offers an updated international perspective on the evolving nature of Pedagogical Content Knowledge and how it is shaping research and teacher education agendas for science teaching. The first few chapters background and introduce a new model known as the Refined Consensus Model (RCM) of Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK) in science education, and clarify and demonstrate its use in research and teacher education and practice. Subsequent chapters show how this new consensus model of PCK in science education is strongly connected with empirical data of varying nature, contains a tailored language to describe the nature of PCK in science education, and can be used as a framework for illuminating past studies and informing the design of futurePCK studies in science education. By presenting and discussing the RCM of PCK within a variety of science education contexts, the book makes the model significantly more applicable to teachers’ work.

Anne Hume was a member of the TEMS Education Research Centre at the University of Waikato, New Zealand from 2005–2016, where she led the Science Research Group, lectured on science education at the undergraduate, graduate and postgraduate levels, and supervised doctoral students. In her last year there she was Director of the TEMS Centre. Her key research interest has been in science PCK development for pre-service and in-service teachers and teacher educators, using approaches such as reflective writing, simulation of classroom practice and Content Representation (CoRe design). 

Rebecca Cooper is a Senior Lecturer at the Faculty of Education, Monash University, Australia. She works predominantly with pre-service and in-service science teachers and her research interests include considering how science teachers and science teacher educators develop pedagogical knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge throughout their careers; improving the quality of science teaching to increase student engagement; and working with teachers on promoting values in their science teaching in an effort to better understand the development of scientific literacy with students. 

Andreas Borowski is a Professor at the Faculty of Mathematics and Science, Potsdam University, Germany, where he is also Director of the Teacher Education and Education Research Center (ZeLB). His research interests are in the professional knowledge of pre-service and in-service physics teachers; and in investigating the connections between pedagogical knowledge, pedagogical content knowledge and content knowledge for pre-service teachers. In the context of in-service education, he studies the influence of physics teachers’ professional knowledge through videotaped classroom performance assessments, together with students’ learning gain and motivation.