Pedagogical Content Knowledge

The Socioscientific Issues Teaching and Learning (SSI-TL) framework is a guide for developing an instructional approach to learning experiences focused on socioscientific issues (SSI). Despite the potential benefits of SSI learning, teachers often struggle to implement this approach in their classrooms, and one of the most prominent reasons for this struggle is science teacher concerns and hesitation associated with incorporating social dimensions of the issues into their instruction. The purpose of this article is to provide science teacher educators with tools to help teachers better manage the integration of the social dimensions of SSI in issues-based teaching.

The Socioscientific Issues Teaching and Learning (SSI-TL) framework is a guide for developing an instructional approach to learning experiences focused on socioscientific issues (SSI). Despite the potential benefits of SSI learning, teachers often struggle to implement this approach in their classrooms, and one of the most prominent reasons for this struggle is science teacher concerns and hesitation associated with incorporating social dimensions of the issues into their instruction. The purpose of this article is to provide science teacher educators with tools to help teachers better manage the integration of the social dimensions of SSI in issues-based teaching.

This study contributes to the growing body of research that highlights the usefulness of professional noticing of children’s mathematical thinking for understanding the complexity and variability in teaching expertise. We explored the noticing expertise of 72 upper elementary school teachers engaged in multi-year professional development focused on children’s fraction thinking. Our assessment addressed the three component skills of professional noticing of children’s mathematical thinking: (a) attending to children’s strategy details, (b) interpreting children’s understandings, and (c) deciding how to respond on the basis of children’s understandings.

In this study, we present a conceptual tool for guiding teachers’ principled pedagogical actions toward equitable instruction, referred to as the Transforming Science Learning (TSL) framework. The TSL framework was developed to address the challenges of enacting an ideological commitment in local contexts–promoting equity and justice through culturally relevant pedagogy (CRP) in K-12 science classrooms.

Teachers face challenges when building the concept of substance with students because tensions of meanings emerge from students’ daily life and canonical ideas developed in classrooms. A powerful tool to address learning, pedagogical, and research challenges is the conceptual profile theory. According to this theory, people employ various ways of conceptualizing the world to signify experiences. Conceptual profiles are models of the heterogeneity of modes of thinking and speaking about a given scientific concept which are used in a variety of contexts. To better understand the heterogeneity of thinking/speaking about substance, the present study aimed to answer: (1) What are the zones that constitute the conceptual profile of substance?; and (2) What ways of thinking and speaking about substance do teachers and students exhibit when engaged in a classroom formative assessment activity?

COVID-19 has thrust educators into a period of uncertainty, complicating conventional ways of teaching and learning. We suspect that the pandemic has magnified the challenges that some high school teachers already experience, particularly when they are the sole chemistry teacher at their school. The pandemic has likely inhibited collegial interactions and access to professional development (PD). Our reflections from redesigning a face-to-face PD program to one that is remotely delivered provide recommendations that advance PD accessibility and interactivity to mitigate isolation and other longstanding challenges teachers may face. In this article, we discuss how the cognitive learning model informed emergent teaching practices that guided the transformation of the PD’s implementation for 20 high school chemistry teachers.

Researchers have typically identified and characterized teachers’ knowledge bases (e.g., pedagogical content knowledge and subject matter knowledge) in an effort to improve enacted instructional strategies. As shown by the Refined Consensus Model (RCM), understanding teacher learning, beliefs, and practices is predicated on the interconnections of such knowledge bases. However, lesson planning (defined as the transformation of subject matter knowledge to enacted pedagogical content knowledge) remains underexplored despite its central position in the RCM. We aim to address this gap by developing a conceptual framework known as Pedagogical Chemistry Sensemaking (PedChemSense).

We use an online Content Knowledge for Teaching (CKT) assessment that measures PSTs’ CKT in one science area: matter and its interactions. In this study, we analyzed process data from administering the online CKT matter assessment to 822 PSTs from across the US to better understand PSTs’ behaviors and interactions on this computer-based science assessment.

This review synthesized insights from 27 NSF-funded projects, totaling $62 million, that studied pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) in STEM education from prekindergarten (PreK) to Grade 12, split roughly equally across mathematics and science education. The projects primarily applied correlational/observational and longitudinal methods, often targeted teaching in the middle school grades, and used a wide variety of approaches to measure teachers’ PCK. The projects advanced substantive knowledge about PCK across four major lines of research, especially regarding the measurement and development of PCK.

School science continues to alienate students identifying with nondominant, non-western cultures, and learners of color, and considers science as an enterprise where success necessitates divorcing the self and corporeal body from ideas and the mind. Resisting the colonizing pedagogy of the mind–body divide, we aimed at creating pedagogical spaces and places in science classes that sustain equitable opportunities for engagement and meaning making where body and mind are enmeshed. In the context of a partnership between school- and university-based educators and researchers, we explored how multimodal literacies cultivated through the performing arts, provide students from minoritized communities opportunities to both create knowledge and to position themselves as science experts and brilliant and creative meaning makers.