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Chapter 3 Methodology
In this study, I am investigating the effect of explicit instruction in TSPCK components on the development of the personal PCK of pre-service teachers about the teaching of electromagnetism. I further investigate how they enact their PCK during their first formal teaching experiences. To achieve this I designed an intervention and used instruments to follow the progress in the development of the participants’ PCK. In this chapter I explain my paradigmatic stance that determined the approach I followed to address the research questions. I also clarify the methodology I followed and elucidate the considerations I took into account to enhance the trustworthiness and reliability of the study.
Introduction
During my years of experience in teacher education, I became aware of the fact that student teachers respond very differently to my teaching and mentoring. During their training they construct different realities about what science teaching is, how learners learn and how they plan to teach. I also realised that the realities they create are greatly influenced by the experiences they had during their own school years. Therefore, eliciting students’ pedagogical reasoning about teaching electromagnetism and following its development and improvement required careful planning.
This was a multiple case study that took place in two stages. Stage one, involving 14 students, set out to establish the impact of an intervention on the CK and PCK of the participants. The intervention focussed explicitly on the components of TSPCK as these pertain to the teaching of electromagnetism. Pre- and post-data were collected through a multiple-choice CK test and a CoRe tool and were analysed both qualitatively and quantitatively. The second stage involved the observation of three students teaching electromagnetism in schools, with the objective of establishing their ability to enact their newly attained TSPCK. Data were collected by video-recording the lessons and conducting interviews with the student teachers. Analysis of the data required careful consideration of aspects, including my own perceptions and biases that could influence my interpretation of the outcomes. In this chapter, I discuss the reasoning behind and implementation of my research design and methodology.
Research paradigm and approach
My assumptions about the nature of reality (ontology) and how it can be known (epistemology), determined the approach to my study, the type of instruments I used, the kind of data I collected, the way in which I collected and analysed it and the way I interpreted the data (Cohen, Manion, & Morrison, 2013). It is therefore essential that I reveal my view about the reality I am investigating to account for the methodology I employed.
My epistemological stance is post-positivistic, because I believe “that social reality is constructed and that it is constructed differently by different individuals” (Gall, Borg, & Gall, 1996, p. 19), which is reinforced by my experience that pre-service teachers respond differently to my instruction and to their first teaching experiences. Furthermore I believe that “the constructed reality does not exist in a vacuum, but is influenced by context” (Nieuwenhuis, 2007a, p. 65), which is supported by my own experience as a teacher and teacher educator.
I approached my study from an interpretive paradigm, as described by Gall et al. (1996), Nieuwenhuis (2007a) and Cohen et al. (2013), which is consistent with my post-positivistic epistemology. In this study, my endeavour was to understand the development of pre-service teacher’s PCK and to investigate how PCK can be improved by explicit instruction in the methodology class. Because PCK is a construct that is embedded in the mind of a teacher, it is often tacit and hidden inside an individual, and it is therefore necessary, in the words of Cohen et al., that “efforts [should be] made to get inside the person and to understand from within” (2013, p. 17). This is one of the key enterprises in the interpretive paradigm. To achieve this, the researcher needs to be closely involved with the participants and their actions. To this end I designed an intervention where students were guided explicitly to think about their teaching of electromagnetism in terms of the five knowledge components of TSPCK. I expected them to write CoRes on the topic of electromagnetism at certain stages during the research in order to ascertain their thinking about teaching the topic. They also had the opportunity to implement their ideas in mock and real teaching situations while I observed them. I interpreted their efforts with the help and input of other subject and science education experts.
To appreciate a person’s PCK and the development thereof, the data gathered had to be informative, mostly communicated through words and sentences for the researcher to explore and interpret. According to Leedy and Ormrod (2005), this calls for a qualitative approach and more specifically a case study. This study strived towards an understanding of how the pre-service teachers recognise, appreciate and transform their own PCK (as the phenomenon under investigation). As such it complied with one of the central characteristics of case study research as indicated by Nieuwenhuis (2007b) and Gall et al. (1996), namely an in-depth study with the focus on each case to understand how each participant makes meaning of the phenomenon in its natural context.
It is often said that case studies have limited generalisability since a case (or a few cases) is not a representative sample of a population. Whereas the purpose of studying a representative sample in quantitative studies is to generalise towards a population, the concern of case study research is to understand the case being studied and to extend and generalise a theory (Cohen et al., 2013). To achieve this, one should take the suggestion of Gall et al. (1996) into consideration that a case study should be designed in such a way that the findings can be applied to other cases typical of the phenomenon. Then, by building up sufficient case studies an argument towards generalization can eventually be constructed. The current study can indeed contribute in this manner, because the case I will be investigating (PCK development of pre-service science teachers at a South African university) is typical of other studies (Kaya, 2009; Mavhunga & Rollnick, 2013; Nilsson, 2008; Van Driel et al., 2002). These studies were undertaken by researchers who had already contributed to the theory of PCK as underpinned by the model of teacher professional knowledge and skill (Gess-Newsome, 2015), described in the literature review.
Even though the main methodological approach of this study was qualitative, the findings in answer to the first sub-question, were supported by quantitative analysis using the Rasch model which will be described in detail in §3.6.
Sample selection
The participants in this study were final-year education students at a university in South Africa. These students were enrolled for the BEd (FET) degree specialising in Physical Sciences for the FET phase (Gr 10-12) and attended classes in their elective modules (major subjects) together with mainstream BSc students in the Science faculty. By the time they started their final year, they had completed a full first year of Physics, Chemistry and Mathematics, a second year of Physics or Chemistry together with Mathematics and a third year of one of Physics, Chemistry or Mathematics. They had also completed modules focussing on generic education concepts and principles running over three years.
The study was conducted in two phases. For both phases, my sampling was pragmatic and convenient. Sixteen students were enrolled for the Physical Sciences methodology module. All 16 students gave consent that the assessments done for the module could be used as data for this study. From this group I collected a baseline CK-test (pre-CK test), an individual Core (pre-CoRe), and a post-CK test and post-CoRe after the intervention. However, two students did not write the second CK and CoRe assessments and were therefore excluded from the study. Thus for the first part of the study I had 14 participating student teachers. The instruments and data collection will be discussed in other sections of this chapter.
Three students constituted the sample for the second phase and were selected as described below. During their Teaching Practice modules, which ran over the second and third terms of their final year, the students could choose which of their elective subjects (Physical Sciences or Mathematics) they preferred to teach in each term. Since electromagnetism is taught in term three in government schools as prescribed by the curriculum document (Department of Basic Education, 2011), only those students who chose to teach Physical Sciences in term three could participate in the second stage of my study. Seven students chose to teach Physical Sciences and were allowed by their mentor teachers to teach Gr 11 classes. I obtained permission from the school principals, the mentor teachers and the students to observe and video-record the students’ lessons and involve them in my study. However, I managed to collect enough data in terms of recorded lessons of only three students.
List of Figures
List of Tables
List of Abbreviations
Chapter 1 Introduction and contextualisation
Introduction
2 The context of the study
Chapter 2 Literature review
13 Introduction
2.2.1 Models of PCK
2.3.1 Misconceptions and learner difficulties in electromagnetism
2.4.1 Components of TSPCK
Chapter 3 Methodology
Introduction
analysis strategies
Chapter 4 The intervention: Teaching PCK of electromagnetism
Introduction
Chapter 5 Pre- and post-intervention assessments: Results, analysis and interpretation
Introduction
Chapter 6 Topic-specific PCK enacted during teaching practice: Lesson observations and interviews
Introduction
Chapter 7 Discussion and concluding remark
Overview of the study
Discussion of the findings
References
Appendices
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