Trade books in elementary education: Misconceptions in science

Elementary pre-service teachers are required to take only a few science courses and are not likely to have the pedagogical content knowledge necessary to choose accurate science trade books. Incorporating trade books in the content areas is a method for integrating subjects and is a common practice among elementary teachers. This study investigates the ability of pre-service elementary teachers to identify misconceptions in science trade book excerpts chosen by the researcher. Survey results were analyzed based on pre-service teachers' responses to a science content question. Often, students focused on misconceptions related to anthropomorphism when they were unsure of the science content as shown by the true/false question. Each of the teacher educators interviewed had experiences with several pre-service teachers' lack of content knowledge affecting performance in the classroom.