A Study On Early Childhood Teachers’ Pedagogical Content Knowledge In The Field Of Science And Its Relationship With Curriculum Quality

What teachers think and do determines the success or failure of education reform.Improving the quality of education necessarily requires the participation of teachers because of their crucial role.However,Pedagogical Content Knowledge(PCK)is the knowledge base for teachers to engage in education and teaching activities.It plays a leading and central role in teachers’ knowledge,and fundamentally determines the professionalism of teachers’ occupations.The purpose of this study is to explore the overall level of kindergarten teachers’ science PCK.Try to analyze whether the factors such as kindergarten level,teaching years,education degree and qualification title will affect teachers’ PCK.We also investigate the relationship between teachers’ PCK and curriculum(collective teaching activity and learning centers activity)quality.In this study,we selected seven public kindergartens of BL,SJ,FQ,XJ,JJ,QB and JY in Hangzhou as sample groups.Under the framework of cluster stratification,a total of 71 teachers were selected as research subjects.We used the PCK questionnaire and coding manual developed by American Ericson School early mathematics project team to collect the PCK data.Through variance analysis,factor analysis and correlation analysis,we found out the relationship between teachers’ basic information and PCK score.We took Chinese Early Childhood Environment Rating Scale(3rd trial version)to evaluate curriculum quality of collective teaching activity and learning centers activity.The relationship between teachers’ PCK level and curriculum quality was analyzed by Spearman’s rank correlation.Research indicates the following:1.Kindergarten teachers’ science PCK is at a medium level of "general or limited understanding of the components of PCK".Meanwhile,this outcome does not change with the background information(kindergarten level,teaching years,education degree and qualification title)of teachers.Teachers’ answers to the PCK questionnaire show the following characteristics:(1)short and general concept expression;(2)confusion of core concepts;(3)lack of holistic thinking of the process and easily confined to the superficial behavior of a fragment.In addition,teachers’PCK shows significant differences in the three dimensions of WHAT,WHO and HOW.Among them,ranked the top is knowledge of instructional methods(HOW),while the worst is content knowledge(WHAT).2.Kindergarten level has a significant impact on the PCK total score and three dimensions.Qualification title is prominent influencing factor of PCK total score and the WHO dimension.There is no statistically significant difference in the total score of PCK and the three dimensions in "teaching age" and "education degree".3.There is a significant positive linear correlation which is low and middle between teachers’ science PCK and the quality of collective teaching activity and learning centers activity in science field.Besides,we made an in-depth discussion on the current situation and development bottleneck of kindergarten teachers’ science PCK,the incubating effect of kindergarten environment on teachers’ PCK,teachers’ qualification title and inverted V-shaped curve,as well as curriculum quality and PCK.Some specific suggestions were discussed at the end.