Connecting pedagogical content knowledge (pck) to teaching practice : investigating physics teachers' enacted pck, personal pck, and engagement with student ideas in classroom discussions
Responsiveness to student ideas-attending to the ideas that students express in classroom interactions and providing appropriate instructional supports in response-is essential for effective science teaching and learning. Although researchers have proposed pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) as an important intellectual resource for teachers' responsiveness to student ideas, it is not yet clear how PCK supports teachers' responsiveness, especially in the context of moment-to-moment classroom interactions. In this study, I use the constructs of enacted PCK (ePCK) and personal PCK (pPCK) to explore how PCK is related to teachers' engagement with student ideas during classroom discussions. In particular, this study focuses on discussions about force and motion in five high-school physics classrooms to investigate the relationship between ePCK and teachers' engagement with student ideas and the relationship between ePCK and pPCK. First, I analyzed video recordings of teachers' classroom discussions for evidence of ePCK and for the quality of teachers' engagement with student ideas, as reflected in their responses to student ideas. In classroom discussions rated as low engagement, I found limited evidence of ePCK; in contrast, in classroom discussions rated as high engagement, teachers displayed ePCK in a variety of different ways. High levels of teacher engagement appeared to be additionally supported by less content-specific teacher moves. Second, I analyzed video recordings of post-unit video-stimulated teacher interviews for evidence of pPCK, as reflected in teachers' reasoning about video clips of these same classroom discussions. I found three levels of pPCK in terms of quality of interpretations of student ideas and connections between instructional strategies and student ideas. Third, I compared ePCK, as evidenced in classroom observations and pPCK, as evidenced in video-stimulated interviews for the same discussion. I found three potential relationships between ePCK and pPCK in classroom discussions: 1) congruence between ePCK and pPCK; 2) incongruence between ePCK and pPCK; and 3) through reflection, generation of pPCK that is then available to inform ePCK in future classroom discussions. I conclude with the contributions to the literature and the implications for teacher education.
Read
- In Collections
-
Electronic Theses & Dissertations
- Copyright Status
- In Copyright
- Material Type
-
Theses
- Authors
-
Kim, Jiwon
- Thesis Advisors
-
Alonzo, Alicia C.
- Committee Members
-
Calabrese Barton, Angela
Gotwals, Amelia
Bieda, Kristen
- Date Published
-
2020
- Subjects
-
Science--Study and teaching
- Degree Level
-
Doctoral
- Language
-
English
- Pages
- 136 pages
- ISBN
-
9798698542940
- Permalink
- https://doi.org/doi:10.25335/y3p9-1z56