PROSPECTIVE TEACHERS�� INITIAL CONCEPTIONS ABOUT PUPILS�� DIFFICULTIES IN SCIENCE AND MATHEMATICS: A POTENTIAL RESOURCE IN TEACHER EDUCATION

A crucial issue for prospective teachers (PTs) in their education is to develop pedagogical content knowledge (PCK; i.e. how to make a topic comprehensible to pupils). However, research has shown that PTs may have tacit ideas about teaching that act as filters preventing consideration of unfamiliar and discrepant ideas. These ideas must be elicited and taken into consideration in order to be modified. Therefore, PTs’ explicit conceptions may constitute a valuable resource in teacher education. The aim of this study was to investigate PTs’ ideas about pupils’ difficulties, at a topic-specific level, upon beginning the teacher education programme. The “Lesson Preparation Method” was used in four case studies to elicit the conceptions of 32 PTs regarding pupils’ difficulties in four specific science and mathematics topics: plant growth, gases, equations and heat and temperature. In all four topic groups (n = 5 – 11), there was a variety of initial conceptions about pupils’ difficulties, which were categorised into two to five topic-specific categories. Although, initially, PTs may not have expressed any notions about pupils’ difficulties, conceptions were elicited by using the Lesson Preparation Method. Furthermore, we found that the initial ideas corresponded with earlier research on pupils’ difficulties, which could provide a potential resource when creating a scaffolding context in teacher education programmes where PCK development is stimulated.     

The influence of narrative and expository lesson text structures on knowledge structures: alternate measures of knowledge structure

This investigation applies two approaches for representing and comparing text structures as undirected network graphs to describe the influence of narrative and expository lesson texts on readers’ knowledge structure elicited as free recall. Narrative and expository lesson texts and undergraduate participants’ free recall essays (n = 90) from a study by Wolfe and Mienko (Br J Educ Psychol 77, 541–564, 2007) were reanalyzed for lexical proximity as sequential occurrence of selected important terms in the text and as actual minimum distances between these terms. The proximity data were then rendered as Pathfinder networks for analysis. Compared to human-rater benchmark measures, the convergent validity of the sequential approach (range of r = .53 to .83, median r = .70) was a little better than that of the minimum distance approach (.51 to .80, median r = .67). Further, we anticipated that the lesson text structure would be reflected in the text structure of the free recall essays, but this was not observed. On average, the essays in all three lesson conditions tended to converge on a sequential expository structure. Further, compared to the expository lesson texts, the narrative lesson text had a distinctly different influence on posttest recall essay text structures. Overall then, the sequential occurrence approach appears to provide a reasonably good, automatically derived method for representing and comparing lesson texts and participants’ essays as network graphs. If further confirmed and fully automated, there is a wide range of application of such measurement approaches for learning and research.