Development of physics teachers' pedagogical content knowledge (PCK)

The purpose of this study was to investigate the development of pre-service physics teachers? PCK on the subject of electricity and magnetism after their completion of subject matter education (SME) in the Department of Secondary Science and Mathematics Education. In this study, the descriptive longitudinal development research method has been adopted to investigate the teachers? and pre-service teachers? PCK. The participants were six pre-service teachers (PSTs) who completed their subject matter education in the Faculty of Science and attended the Faculty of Education in 2007-2008 Spring-Term and six teachers who were working in high schools of the Ministry of National Education in Trabzon city and nearby towns. PCK test, observations, lesson plans and informal interviews are used as data collection instruments to determine the components of PCK, i.e. the subject matter knowledge, knowledge of presentations of subject matter, learners? prior knowledge and learning difficulties and orientations. PCK test was applied to the PSTs at four separate times during their teacher training program. During the last stage of the three-term data collection period, field-based experience of the PSTs was observed, informal interviews parallel to lesson plans were arranged and the collected data were analyzed using content analysis. The result of the research showed that the four components of PCK interact with each other and that prior experience, field-based experience, teacher training, written materials, mentors, school context, curriculum knowledge are the most important factors affecting the PCK development. In teacher training programs a decline in subject matter component is determined in the two terms. On the other hand, improvements in the varieties of presentation and changes in the orientations during the field-based experience, an increase in the knowledge of learning difficulties have been determined. It is concluded that PCK of teachers are well developed while changes in various components of the PCK of PSTs during this research occurred, but the pre-service teachers couldn?t integrate these components until the beginning of field-based experience where they also displayed unstable orientations.