| The purpose of this study is to investigate the importance of various aspects of pedagogical content knowledge (PCK), teachers' self-evaluation of PCK, and how PCK develops in prospective secondary mathematics teachers. For this paper, Shulman's (1986) definition of pedagogical content knowledge will be used. "Pedagogical content knowledge goes beyond knowledge of subject matter per se to the dimension of subject matter for teaching. Within the category of pedagogical content knowledge...[are] the ways of representing and formulating the subject that make it comprehensible to others. Pedagogical content knowledge also includes an understanding of what makes the learning of specific topics easy or difficult" (Shulman, 1986, p. 9).; The method used to investigate these questions was through an anonymous online questionnaire. Data were collected from 18 teachers and 16 professors of mathematics education. Both quantitative and qualitative methods were used to analyze the data to determine themes amongst the participants.; The findings reveal that professors and teachers hold different beliefs about the importance of the different aspects of PCK. Professors believe the most important aspect of PCK that teachers should have is the ability to assess student understanding from class discussions. Teachers, on the other hand, believe that the most important aspect of PCK is the ability to know and find mathematical problems and tasks. Additionally, as a group, teachers report that they are good at finding mathematical problems (the aspect of PCK that they believe is the most important), but that they only sometimes assess student understanding from class discussions (the aspect of PCK that professors believe is most important). And finally, teachers believe that they learn PCK through their own teaching experience. The results of this study indicate that the brief time spent in preservice education does not provide sufficient instruction in learning pedagogical content knowledge. |
