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The purpose of this study was to investigate the transfer of the competence to transform content knowledge learned in electric circuits to a new topic in either chemistry or physics. The study was located in a physics methodology class with 10 pre-service teachers, who were in their final year of study. They had a 6-week-long intervention that was underpinned by making explicit the pedagogical transformation effect derived from the interactive use of five content specific knowledge components: (a) learner prior knowledge; (b) curricular saliency; (c) what is difficult to understand; (d) representation; and (e) conceptual teaching strategies. The research design employed qualitative methods for the collection and analysis of data. Primary data was collected at the end of the intervention using Content Representations (CoRe) in the topic of the intervention and another after a 6 week period in a topic of transfer. The prompts of the CoRe were adapted to reveal the five content-specific knowledge components specifically. Supplementary data, which were written descriptions by pre-service teachers of the strategies they used in engaging with a topic of transfer, were also analysed. Findings detail the successful transfer of the learned competence to transform content knowledge, particularly through formulation of Big Ideas derived from topic classification maps, identification of specific concepts likely to pose learning difficulties for learners and the simultaneous use of multilevel representations, all used collectively and interactively in new physics or chemistry topics. We discuss the implications for the further development of topic-specific PCK across science topics.

Scientific reasoning is crucial to any scientific discipline. One sub-skill particularly relevant to the scientific enterprise is theory evidence coordination. This study, underpinned by Kuhn's framework for scientific reasoning, investigates how university students coordinate their self-generated theory and evidence in a physics topic (energy) and in non-content specific (non-physics-based) situations. Twenty-seven students completed five written reasoning tasks, three of which deal with energy concepts (physics-based) and two tasks concern with non-physics-based situations. The analysis focused on: (a) the completeness and correctness of the theory; (b) the source of the evidence; (c) theory evidence coordination or non-coordination; and (d) if coordination occurs, whether the evidence supports or refutes the theory, and the quality of students’ explanations. The outcomes revealed that the students tended to coordinate theory and evidence for non-physics tasks as opposed to physics problems. When theory evidence coordination occurred, regardless of the type of scenarios, the evidence primarily supported the theory in the form of a poor explanation. The importance of content knowledge for scientific reasoning is discussed. The implications for applying scientific reasoning as an assessment tool in science are also highlighted.