Pre-service Teachers' Pedagogical Content Knowledge: Implications for Teaching

Effective teachers have good pedagogical content knowledge (PCK). Pedagogical content knowledge is the intersection of discipline specific content knowledge and pedagogical knowledge. How effectively are pre-service teachers helped to develop good PCK? In this project we asked our pre-service teachers how they would respond to a particular student misconception before and after teaching three topics, to determine if there had been any growth in their PCK. Although the pre-service teachers had deepened their knowledge on teaching specific mathematics content, few changed their answer to the question or showed a deeper understanding of what the student had understood. This then has implications for our teaching - we need to make our thinking explicit so that pre-service teachers can see the complexity of these issues