PCK of teaching electrochemistry in chemistry teachers: A case in Johannesburg, Gauteng Province, South Africa

Abstract

Electrochemistry is an important topic in chemistry due to its wide application in everyday life. Althoughit is found in most high school curricula throughout the world, it is commonly regarded as anabstract and difficult topic to teach. This paper explores the teacher knowledge possessed by a diversegroup of South African grade 12 teachers for teaching this topic. Two types of teacher knowledge wereexplored — knowledge of the content to be taught and topic specific pedagogical content knowledge.Topic specific content knowledge is the ability to reason about teaching the topic through 5 componentsregarded as important for the transformation of content knowledge, viz. Learner Prior Knowledge,Curricular Saliency, What is difficult to teach, Representations and Conceptual Teaching Strategies.64 teachers responded to two instruments, measuring the two teacher knowledge bases. Resultsreflected the socio-diversity of the teachers with overall moderately high scores obtained on contentknowledge which were not necessarily matched by good tspck. Reasons for this are explored.