Re-examining Pedagogical Content Knowledge in Science Education

Amanda Berry, Patricia Friedrichsen, John Loughran, Amanda Berry, Patricia Friedrichsen, John Loughran

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317564645
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Teaching Science & Technology

Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK) has been adapted, adopted, and taken up in a diversity of ways in science education since the concept was introduced in the mid-1980s. Now that it is so well embedded within the language of teaching and learning, research and knowledge about the construct needs to be more useable and applicable to the work of science teachers, especially so in these times when standards and other measures are being used to define their knowledge, skills, and abilities.

Re-examining Pedagogical Content Knowledge in Science Education is organized around three themes: Re-examining PCK: Issues, ideas and development; Research developments and trajectories; Emerging themes in PCK research. Featuring the most up-to-date work from leading PCK scholars in science education across the globe, this volume maps where PCK has been, where it is going, and how it now informs and enhances knowledge of science teachers' professional knowledge. It illustrates how the PCK research agenda has developed and can make a difference to teachers' practice and students' learning of science.

PART I

Introducing PCK

Issues, ideas, and development

1

PCK

Its genesis and exodus

Lee S. Shulman

STANFORD UNIVERSITY

Background

When the contributing authors of this book met together at what became known as the PCK Summit, the first session was a video conference with Lee Shulman who offered a personal glimpse into his thinking about the issues, times, and events that have shaped PCK. Shulman typically presented a coherent, thoughtful, and well-structured presentation and invited the audience into his thinking in ways that gave insights into the history of PCK; a history that is important in understanding why this seductive construct has attracted so much attention from researchers for so long.

The chapter that follows is an edited transcript of Shulman’s presentation and, as quickly becomes apparent, brings the construct to life in ways that build a deep understanding of PCK, its value, and the place of sophisticated knowledge in teaching.

The birth of PCK

In some ways I feel a little uncomfortable talking authoritatively about pedagogical content knowledge now. I feel like the biological father of a baby that was raised in its infancy and then given away for adoption or foster care when it was about five years old. During the years that followed, the youngster was raised by many parents and played with many peers. Now that it has survived adolescence and reached emergent adulthood, most of you know far more about PCK than I possibly could because you have been living with, developing, elaborating, revising, and applying that set of ideas in serious research and pedagogical work.

I have been caught up in a number of other topics in the last 30 years. Therefore, the most appropriate thing for me to do on this occasion is to take us back and re-think with you where this idea came from and what I had in mind when it was first conceived. What was its provenance? What was my motivation? And now, looking back at PCK and its evolution, what do I see as its strengths, but also what do I see as its weaknesses? I think that any idea, however generative, is a product of its time and circumstance. Any idea must be understood as a contribution to the conversation of which it was a part, not as a universal truth or generalization. PCK certainly has weaknesses, and I trust that many of you are shoring up those deficiencies, elaborating and going beyond its initial formulation, as should be the fate of any reasonably good idea.

A discipline can be organized in different ways

I have tried to ask myself what were the very first roots of this idea that I can remember? And what I remember is sitting in an undergraduate classroom at the University of Chicago with Professor Joseph Schwab in 1957 or 1958. Schwab was either teaching a course in the biological sciences or a course in the history, philosophy, and methods of science—I don’t recall which because I was blessed with the opportunity to be his student in both those year-long courses. Schwab was regularly talking about a painfully difficult idea—the structure of the subject matter. He was wrestling with concepts of the structure of subject matter, the organization of knowledge, and how disciplinary organization relates to how people come to a discipline. He would later refer to the distinction between the substantive and syntactic structures of subject matter, and I believe he was engaging with the precursors of those ideas as he taught.

The Summit at which we are now engaged has been organized by BSCS, the Biological Science Curriculum Study. As Schwab described it to me (we remained close until he died in 1988), the scientists who were trying to invent BSCS as a curriculum in the late fifties and early sixties had come to a stalemate. They were attempting to create the biological curricular equivalent of the ‘new math’ and the ‘new physics.’ But they seemed unable to make any progress. Instead, they were constantly arguing. As he described the situation, Schwab and a couple of others had this great insight. Their insight was that the reason they were arguing is that tacitly they had competing conceptions of what counted as biology. And if you can’t agree on what a subject entails, it’s rather difficult to design a curriculum to teach it. Schwab and his co-conspirators made the modest suggestion that they should divide biology into three variations, divide the developers into three compatible groups, who then create three parallel curricula rather than continue trying to develop an elusive consensus on just one. Thus three BSCS curricula emerged—cell biology, structure-function biology, and ecology (forgive me if I have these wrong)—each representing contrasting starting points and syntactic and substantive structures for the discipline. The notion that the content of a discipline was not a ‘given’ but was a decision, a ­construction, a matter of debate and deliberation, left an indelible impression upon me. A discipline did not necessarily have but one structure (contrary to those who insisted on discussing ‘the’ structure of a subject matter); its structures depended upon how one organized the discipline for both inquiry and for teaching.

Connecting subject matter to pedagogy

Five years after arriving at Michigan State for my first post-PhD academic appointment, during which time I was primarily engaged in studying the problem-solving processes of teachers (a continuation of my doctoral dissertation), I was invited to join the faculty of Michigan State’s new medical school because I was doing research on complex problem-solving and because I understood some of the factors associated with developing new methods for teaching novices how to engage with medical problems. We were inventing a novel curriculum for this new school, in which medical problem-solving was one of the organizing principles of the entire school, along with the importance of doctor–patient interaction, empathy, and communication. I was able to take my extant research program on teacher thinking and I shifted it entirely to looking at how physicians think and how physicians solve problems in the processes of medical diagnosis. Among the findings of this body of research, which we pursued for almost ten years in collaboration with my close friend and colleague Professor Arthur Elstein (Elstein, Shulman, & Sprafka, 1978) was the domain-specificity of clinical diagnosis. It was quite striking that although medicine was traditionally taught as if there was some generic cognitive skill called Diagnostic Ability, there was no evidence of the presence of such a general cognitive skill. Indeed, what we discovered about the ability to think like a physician—as we studied outstanding specialists in general internal medicine and how they worked on complicated medical problems—the great surprise that we brought to the medical world was there wasn’t such a thing as Diagnostic Ability, that diagnostic knowledge and competence was domain specific. Physicians didn’t have generalized diagnostic knowledge. They had domain-specific knowledge. If your specialty was cardiovascular medicine, and you encountered a patient who presented with a case of neurological dysfunction or of renal dysfunction, we could not presume that you would be very good at diagnosing it. Here was perhaps the most important finding of our studies in medical problem-solving, a finding that influenced both assessment and teaching in medical education, and I didn’t immediately see its relevance for my primary field, the study of teaching at the primary and secondary levels.

In the mid-1970s, my MSU colleagues and I took our general strategies and methods for studying medical thinking and applied them to the study of pedagogical reasoning and decision-making among teachers. We took a cognitive (though not yet a domain-specific) approach to the study of teaching, and using that model we received substantial government funding to create the Institute for Research on Teaching (IRT) at Michigan State. The big contribution of the IRT was to shift the focus of research on teaching, from the then-dominant behaviorist paradigm for research on teacher behavior that was called process–product research, to research on teacher thinking, teacher knowledge, teacher planning, teacher decision-making, and teachers’ conceptions of their subject matter and how that related to how they performed. It was really quite a major shift, and it helped lead the field in quite new directions. What strikes me looking back on those years, for some of which we were doing the medical and pedagogical research concurrently, is we were so invested in looking at teacher knowledge and thinking that we never connected questions of subject matter content to that. We never examined how teacher thinking was domain specific. The work on teacher planning was work on teacher planning generically. It was not differentiated to look at the differences between planning in the teaching of mathematics and the teaching of history.

And so it was that in the early eighties, shortly after I moved to Stanford after two productive decades at Michigan State in the teacher education programs, the medical school and the IRT, the notion that there was a ‘missing paradigm’ in the study of teaching and teacher education hit me between the eyes. It was embodied in the title that Susan Stodolsky later gave to her important book The Subject Matters (Stodolsky, 1988). It really matters. The deep problem of process–product research was not simply that it ignored teacher thinking and only looked at teacher behavior; it treated the skills of teaching simply and generically. Indeed, even the cognitive approaches that we pioneered at the IRT could be indicted on those grounds. That’s when we began the work that became the work on PCK. But where did this notion of PCK come from in more immediate terms?

Inferring the existence of PCK without actually locating it

I look back on the speculations regarding PCK as similar to the way in which astronomers discovered the planet Neptune. We were comfortable using the idea of teacher content knowledge; we knew that there was a category called content knowledge. There had been a lot of research on content knowledge and one of the striking things about the empirical relationship between content knowledge and the quality of teaching was that the coefficients and beta weights were far weaker than we thought they ought to be and there was a lot of variation in those values. By the same token we had several decades of experience measuring generic pedagogical skill and knowledge and those constructs appeared to have better correlations with teaching and a teaching practice than content knowledge alone. And yet pedagogical skill was relentlessly domain-independent and generic. I think it was only when we began to think that way that we were able to put together the much older findings from medicine and think, “You know what? If the work of a physician and the quality of a physician’s diagnoses and treatment decisions are domain specific, isn’t this the case with teaching as well? Isn’t there a missing ‘planet’ between content and pedagogy that defines the essential missing aspect of teaching?” Thus did the work on PCK begin.

Evolution of PCK: Teacher knowledge is domain specific and contextualized

The research began with a multi-year study called The Teacher Knowledge Project supported by a grant from the Spencer Foundation. With the participation of several generations of remarkable graduate students, we studied how new secondary school teachers learn to teach within the content areas of science, math, English, and history. Slowly but surely the knowledge grew. Studies were conducted within disciplines as well as between them. Maher Hashweh studied how middle school teachers’ instruction on topics in physical sciences and biological sciences (often taught together in the general science middle school curriculum) were taught quite differently depending on the depth and quality of a given teacher’s grasp of both the content and associated pedagogy of those topics. Pam Grossman discovered how the same teacher’s approach to teaching English literature changed when teaching the same students the rules of grammar. Bill Carlsen described how biology teachers’ planning and teaching within a year-long biology course for the same class changed when they moved from aspects of biology whose content and pedagogy they knew well, for example ecology or the physiology of organ systems, to topics they found more difficult to teach, for example genetics.

As we were pursuing this research and moving ahead in articulating a conception of content knowledge, pedagogical knowledge, and PCK (Shulman, 1986), there arose a very critical challenge and opportunity. Gary Sykes (also among the cohort of graduate students) and I were invited by the Carnegie Corporation’s Commission on the Future of the Teaching Profession to do a policy analysis of whether a medicine-like National Board would make the kind of sense in teaching as it did to define and govern standards of medical knowledge and practice.

In the policy paper we wrote, A National Board for Teaching: In search of a Bold Standard, (Shulman & Sykes, 1986), we came to three conclusions. One was that a National Board was a fine idea, well worth establishing and supporting. Teaching ought to have its own National Board with an associated program of quality assessment. The second conclusion was that it couldn’t have just one board and a single assessment because teaching was not a singular practice. Really accomplished teaching had to be looked at contextually which meant it had to be content specific. So we proposed that there be different boards for different teachers who taught different subject matters at different age levels. The third thing we argued was if you try to measure accomplished teaching and the understandings and skills needed to engage in such teaching by using the kinds of assessment methods that were currently extant, more harm than good would be brought upon the teaching profession. Extant assessment methods tended to be some combination of multiple-choice tests of teaching and generic observation schedules used generally by principals who visited classrooms for thirty minutes at a time, and didn’t need to know the subject matter being taught.

The challenge to develop a theoretical rationale for a National Board was turned on its head when I was given the challenge by the Carnegie Corporation to lead a research group to design this National Board assessment for teachers that Sykes and I had described in principle, primarily by calling attention to what it should avoid. When I accepted that challenge, it was clear that any assessments of teaching competence would have to be domain specific. A new assessment wasn’t going to look like the one-size-fits-all National Teacher’s Examination of the ETS (Educational Testing Service). The assessment system we created, designed, revised, field tested, and handed over to the newly organized National Board during that period reflected our research and thinking about PCK. It is domain specific. It is also development-level specific, vis-à-vis the students being taught. We initially devoted two years to developing very complex assessments that were simulations of the many facets of domain-specific teaching. Our cases-in-point were elementary-level mathematics and secondary history. When we appreciated the limitations of the simulation-based four-day assessment center (it was not an inexpensive endeavor), we turned to a portfolio-based system that was field tested in elementary language arts and secondary biology. Angelo Collins, who later led the science standards project for the National Academy of Sciences and was the founding executive director of the Knowles Science Teaching Foundation program, directed our work in secondary biology. In all this work, attention was carefully directed at the intersection of pedagogy and content, at what teachers needed to know and be able to do in order to teach the content and skills of the curriculum to students of different ages and backgrounds. It was applied PCK on steroids.

The reason we shifted from a simulation-based assessment system to a year-long portfolio-based assessment documenting in a structured fashion the teaching and learning that occurred in teachers’ classrooms foreshadows the comments I shall soon make about some of the limitations of the original PCK idea. We moved to portfolios because we came to recognize that domain-specific teacher knowledge couldn’t be rendered operational unless it is also contextualized. Paraphrasing Schwab’s commonplaces, teachers teach what they teach to specific students in some setting. Unless you have a mode of assessment that can document the students they were teaching, the specific content, the instructional setting, and, in some manner, the ‘historical’ context in which they were teaching over a school year (early or late, during a heavy testing period or before the holidays), you woul...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• PART I Introducing PCK: Issues, ideas, and development
• PART II Research developments and trajectories
• PART III Pedagogical content knowledge: Emerging themes
• PART IV Provocations and closing thoughts
• About the contributors
• Index