Investigating a mechanism for transfer of topic-specific pedagogical content knowledge in a new chemistry topic

A research report submitted to the Faculty of Science, in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2015.Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK) is a knowledge base for teaching that has been shown to be topic-specific. PCK in a particular science topic enables a teacher to pedagogically transform Content Knowledge (CK) to teach that topic. This ability to transform CK for teaching purposes is a version of PCK recognised as Topic-Specific Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TSPCK). TSPCK, like PCK, is not transferable, thus we cannot assume that good pedagogical transformations observed in one topic can be consequently observed in another. In addition it has been shown that the PCK knowledge base for teaching is tacit in nature. This means that most teachers with such a knowledge base are not aware of it explicitly, or how they develop it. The purpose of the study was to explore the mechanism which pre-service teachers used to apply learnt reasoning to transform CK in a new topic