April A. Nelms, Ed.S.

aanelms@crimson.ua.eduUniversity of AlabamaCollege of Education

Department of Curriculum & InstructionSecondary Science Education

In the late 1980’s, Lee Shulman introduced the educational research arena to a construct he coined as Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK). Shulman’s original definition of the construct explains that teachers merge their knowledge of content and pedagogy to represent the knowledge to diverse learners decisively (Shulman, 1987).

This action research study examines how PCK develops over the course of planning and teaching a science lesson.

Students involved in a university science methods course voluntarily participated in this study. The science methods course instructor required students to develop science lessons to teach in their clinical classroom placement. The researcher selected to analyze the level of PCK of the first science lesson plan taught by the pre-service science teachers in their assigned science classroom.

1. What level of PCK do pre-service secondary science teachers possess as they prepared their first lesson to be taught in a science classroom?

2. Does the level of PCK affect pre-service secondary science teachers’ performance in developing an effective science lesson plan for a specific group of pre-service teachers?

• The Lesson Preparation Method (Vandervalk and Broekman, 1999)• Participants developed Learning Cycle Lessons• A rubric was developed and applied to the lessons to evaluate PCK level based on the premise the PCK is comprised of several components

Results indicated that these specific pre-service science teachers were in the developing level. The correlation between level of PCK and ability to create an effective science lesson indicated that participants in the developing level should score between eighty and eighty-nine on a scale of one-hundred as the score on the science lesson plan.

Pre-service teachers develop their PCK overtime. Strengths and weaknesses were evidenced in students’ lesson preparation. This knowledge will be useful in planning to teach pre-service science teachers in the future.

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