Session Information
10 SES 06 C, Research on Professional Knowledge and Identity in Teacher Education
Paper Session
Contribution
Theoretical Framework
This study reports a case study that investigated in detail one female freshman college student's alternative conceptions, alternative framework and learning of force and motion during a short small group instruction and subsequent tutoring interviews. The researcher in this study acted as the teacher of the small group and the tutor for the interviews. The student who participated in this study had a very limited physics learning experience.
Although Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK) is being debated in the contexts teachers’ needs, competencies, and development less is known about how one can actually produce effective PCK on a specific topic. Moreover, to the best of my knowledge, in the current literature there is no account of actual creation of PCK that vividly sets an example by narrating the process. As a teacher or a teacher educator one can ask ‘where the fruits of PCK grow and how to collect and use them.’ Hence, by narrating the production of PCK this paper will contribute to the literature an answer of how an experienced teacher can effectively capture the moment of PCK creation during a process of teacher – student interaction in a teaching experiment episode.
Lee S. Shulman (1986) stressed the need for teachers to maintain a large knowledge base on what works best during teaching including “the most useful forms of representation of those ideas, the most powerful analogies, illustrations, examples, explanations, and demonstrations.” He also asserted that these might be “derive[d] from research whereas others originate in the wisdom of practice.” It is remarkably important that Shulman regarded knowledge created by studies of investigations of student misconceptions as “an important component of the pedagogical understanding of subject matter,” and thought that it “should be included at the heart of our definition of needed pedagogical knowledge.” Hence in this study I wanted to investigate the following research questions.
Research questions
1. What is the student's alternative framework about force and motion?
2. How does the student respond to cognitive challenges about force and motion and how does her learning progress during the course of this research study?
3. How does the teacher researcher’s PCK help his student’s learning and how his PCK evolves during the process?
4. Can such a study yield creation of new PCK on teaching force and motion?
Objective
The primary research objective was to explore, describe, and explain the student's learning process in depth and while doing so pay special attention to what sorts of teaching/learning strategies and aids fosters her understandings.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Cobb, P., & Steffe, L. P. (1983). The constructivist researcher as teacher and model builder. Journal for Research in Mathematics Education, 14, 83-94. Shulman, L. S. (1986). Those Who Understood: Knowledge Growth in Teaching. Educational Researcher, 15(2), 4-14. Tzur, R. (1995). Interaction and Children's Fraction Learning (Iteration, Recursive Partitioning). Doctoral dissertation, University of Georgia.
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