Investigation of pedagogical content knowledge about electricity topic of a science teacher candidate according to didactic transposition theory

The main purpose of this research is to determine the pedagogical content knowledge of a science teacher candidate within the frame of didactic transposition theory. In accordance with this purpose, single case study that is one of the qualitative research design was used. The participant of this research is a teacher candidate who was studying in Science Teaching Department at a state university in Turkey in 2014-2015 academic year. In determining the participant of the study, teacher candidates' academic standings and behaviors in classroom was taken into consideration and purposive sampling technique was used.Data collection tools consist of unstructured and semi-structured interviews and observations.The data was obtained from teacher candidate's presentations about one of the 5th grade science units "Necessity of our Life: Electricity" within the "Teaching Practice" course, unstructured and semi-structured observation forms and interviews. As a result of the research, all observations and interviews led to the conclusion that the pedagogical content knowledge of the science teacher candidate was limited both conceptually and practically.In particular, it was determined that the limitation was about teaching strategies, which means the transformation of information in ensuring the understanding of students.Besides teacher candidate knew and practiced certain teaching strategies, methods and techniques; he also benefited from different activities belong to "Necessity of our Life: Electricity" unit which are not included in textbooks. However, it was determined that many of those activities are teacher-centered. The reason of this issue was identified as having difficulties in managing classroom.