Development of Student Teachers’ Pedagogical Content Knowledge for Teaching Primary Proportions during Practicum in China

This research focuses on the development of student teachers’ (STs) pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) for teaching primary proportions during their practicum experience and associated factors, a topic of growing interest in China and internationally. PCK is essential professional knowledge for teachers as it is associated with effective teaching and children’s learning. PCK represents teacher knowledge for integrating subject content into comprehensible forms for all learners to fulfill specific teaching purposes. Teacher knowledge of curriculum, knowledge of learners, and knowledge of instructional strategies are widely accepted as three important PCK components. Mathematics is an important subject in the 9-year compulsory education system in China, and learning primary mathematics is fundamental for children to access higher education. In China, some researchers assert that many novice primary teachers’ effectiveness is constrained by weak PCK. Therefore, it is important to seek ways to cultivate effective mathematics teachers with robust PCK, especially before they start their careers. Practicum in China is the last phase of initial teacher education. During practicum, STs are assigned to one school for two to six months where they complete classroom tasks including teaching observations, curriculum design, and teaching. Within their initial teacher education, the practicum is their final opportunity to expand PCK before becoming a qualified teacher. To address the research questions, “Is practicum effective for developing PCK? How is STs’ PCK for proportion teaching in terms of knowledge of curriculum, knowledge of learners, and knowledge of instructional strategies developed during practicum?”, this qualitative case study explored the effectiveness of practicum for developing three PCK components and 12 subcomponents, and factors associated with STs’ PCK development. Participants were six student teachers and four mentor teachers who were working together during a 2-month practicum. Data was collected through questionnaires, interviews, documents, and observation, and analysed with a scoring rubric, qualitative deductive, and inductive processes. The findings showed that practicum was more effective in cultivating knowledge of instructional strategies and two subcomponents of knowledge of students; less effective for developing two subdomains of knowledge of curriculum and two subcomponents of knowledge of students; and not effective for developing two subdomains of knowledge of curriculum. Findings also showed that different tasks in practicum may contribute to development of different PCK aspects, and that the three practicum tasks, mentor teachers and STs’ confidence to teach may be strongly associated with PCK development. The findings can enable teacher education programmes to be more strategic about the use of practicum for specific STs’ PCK needs. Contributions of this research include: (a) support other than practicum is needed to develop some aspects of PCK, and (b) further development of the scoring rubric can be applied. Findings of this research may be generalisable to other mathematics topics and the combination of questionnaire and the scoring rubric may have potential for investigating PCK across other subject areas.