Study On Pedagogical Content Knowledge Of Preschool Teachers

As the development of society, work division has been more and more specific and meticulous. Teacher, as a career, following this tide, also starts to show the trend of its professional development. Research on teacher and teacher’s education is more and more active in different countries around the world. And the professional development of teacher becomes one of the key themes in education reform. How to promote the professional development of teacher? It becomes a key question on teacher’s education reform. Among various theory, PCK (pedagogical content knowledge), proposed by well-known American educationist Shulman, has won wide acknowledgement and formed its unique research school.Every teacher has his or her own PCK, no exception for preschool teachers. This study is organized in four sub-studies:(1) An analysis of the status of preschool teachers’PCK will be reported.(2) The correlation between basic information and PCK of preschool teachers will be reported.(3) A comparison is made among PCK of preschool teachers on language, mathematics and arts.(4) How do preschool teachers obtain the three components of PCK in their practical teaching? As for the first three issues, the researcher takes the method of quantitative analysis, taking165preschool teachers as the participants, with the combined research method of video analysis and questionnaire survey. Data was collected by using the coding manual developed by American Ericson School early mathematics project team. The hypothesis was tested with SPSS17.0and by using General Factorial ANOVA and its relative analysis. As for the last issue, selecting9excellent teachers from the165teachers, the researcher takes the qualitative research methods as text analysis, observation method and interview method.What is discovered from the PCK status is that the differences between every two of the three elements of preschool PCK are extremely obvious. Ranked the top is knowledge of instructional methods (how), which is followed by knowledge of children (who), the poorest being content knowledge (what). Preschool teachers are best at judging the effectiveness of teaching and worst at grasping the relation among various concepts. PCK of the preschool teachers can be ranked at the second level, that is, they can generally and limitedly understand the components of PCK. After inspection on the correlation between the teacher’s basic information and their PCK, we discover that statistically there is no obvious correlation between teaching years, education degree, qualification title and PCK total score plus its what, who and how. However the kindergarten level has obvious correlation with the later. There is a positive correlation between them, i.e., the higher of the school level, the higher of the teacher’s PCK. What is discovered is that teachers with11-20teaching years are remarkably better than the rest on the general level of PCK and its what, who, how.Comparing the PCK level of language, mathematics and art, we discover that the teachers’ PCK level keep consistent with their performance on specific subject, ie., being very poor on "recognize connections among the subject ideas", being on "General and limited understanding of components of PCK" level. In the three areas,"how" wins the highest score, followed by "who", with "what" at last. Comparing the correlation of the three components, we found that the correlation between "who" and "how" is the highest, followed by "what" and "who", with "what" and "how" the lowest. Compare the correlation of three area, we find that mathematics is the best, art is in the middle and language is the worst. The result of comparing each components in three subjects indicate that the fine art performs best in PCK total score and "how", language is the best on "what", while mathematics has no satisfactory performance in any way. The three subjects have no obvious differences on "who".Through qualitative analysis, in this section what mostly discussed is how the nine excellent teachers obtain the three components of PCK. Conclusions are as follows:teaching practice is the best way in acquiring the three components; teaching reflecting is the forceful way in acquiring them; among the three components, knowledge of children and knowledge of instructional methods serves each other as a channel; content knowledge obtained is lacking of completeness, and it has little interchange with the knowledge about knowledge of children and knowledge of instructional methods.Through the above series of researches, there are a few following final conclusions:(1)the components of the preschool teacher’s PCK are content knowledge, knowledge of children, knowledge of instructional methods. Its organic blending is not tight.(2)The three components are unevenly developed.(3)The preschool teacher’s PCK is discrepant in three subjects.(4) Teaching practice is the best way in acquiring the three components.