Teacher Knowledge and Representation of Content in Instruction about Heat Energy and Temperature.

Pedagogical content knowledge, the content-specific knowledge which embodies the aspects of content most germane to its teachability and which is most likely to distinguish the understanding of the content specialist from the pedagogue, has been widely regarded as important for effective teaching of complex subject matter such as science. This paper focuses on one aspect of pedagogical content knowledge, topic-specific pedagogical strategies, and describes a framework for categorizing the strategies on the basis of how the subject matter is represented. The research was conducted in the context of a large teacher enhancement project which enabled experienced teachers to use microcomputer-based laboratories to help students develop scientific knowledge of heat energy and temperature. The conceptual analysis undertaken in this study demonstrates the utility of a conceptual analysis of instructional activities with respect to representation of content, allows comparison of instructional activities that may be very different contextually, and may provide a framework for conceiving new activities that are powerful representations of the content. Results indicate that teachers did not appear to have differentiated knowledge of instructional tasks with respect to the distinction between heat energy and temperature. Implications for teacher preparation are also discussed. (Contains 31 references.) (JRH)