Pre-service elementary teachers' understandings of knowledge domains and efficacy beliefs in mathematics and science teaching

Abstract

This research focuses on a cohort of pre-service elementary teachers and their perspectives with respect to the knowledge required for teaching science and mathematics at the beginning and end of their first academic year in a teacher preparation program. An activity, designed to emphasize the differences between factual/procedural knowledge and conceptual knowledge in elementary mathematics and science, was analyzed along with classroom discussions in order to gain deeper understandings of the perspectives of knowledge for teaching for the given cohort. Additionally, subject specific efficacy beliefs were compared to teaching confidence ratings related to specific science and mathematics topics. The pre-service teachers' expressed a variety of ideas regarding the role of content knowledge, and the different types of content knowledge (i.e., factual/procedural and conceptual), in teaching mathematics and science. Furthermore, their perceptions of the nature of mathematics and the nature of science were discussed. By utilizing both quantitative and qualitative methods, this project was able to not only note data trends, but also obtain depth and richness regarding conceptions of the knowledge required for teaching mathematics and science provided by the voices of the pre-service teachers.