A Exploratory Study On Mathematics PCK Of 30 Early Childhood Teachers In Shanghai

The term Pedagogical Content Knowledge [PCK] describes the coalescence of three kinds of knowledge considered essential to effective teaching:knowledge of content, students, and pedagogy (Shulman,1986). The present study focused on the characterizes of PCK of a group of early childhood teachers, the relationships among different kinds of knowledge present in PCK,and the roles of teaching years, professional titles, in-server professional training, educational background played in the development of PCK.The samples of 30 teachers were randomly selected from 14 different kindergartens in Shanghai, and the study had been conducted based on the video-cued PCK Questionnaires provided by Erikson Institute, Chicago. The data was analyzed by using descriptive statistics methods, such as t-test, one way ANOVA and Pearson correlation.The major contributions of the study are as follows:1. Overall speaking, teachers had general and limited understandings of the components of PCK. The content knowledge scores are the highest and with smallest deviation, in contrast, the pedagogy knowledge scores are the lowest with the widest range of variance.2. Significant correlations existed among three components of PCK. The most significant interaction is between the knowledge of students and the knowledge of pedagogy and the lowest interaction between the knowledge of students and the knowledge of content. In addition, the knowledge of pedagogy shows the strongest correlations with PCK total scores.3. Teaching years, professional titles, in-server professional training has influence on teachers＇PCK. Rich teaching experience and qualified in-server professional training promoted the development of PCK. However, educational background was not a significant element to PCK.Based on the research results, suggestions were proposed for teachers of early education.