South African schools have been confronted with educational reform since the mid-nineties and the process is still continuing. The concomitant changes put a very high demand on physical sciences teachers and also have an impact on teacher behaviour. The purpose of this study was to probe whether teachers could be considered equipped to teach the…

The purpose of this paper is to capture the pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) of university professors about quantum chemistry. More specifically, we aimed to identify and analyze relationships between specific PCK components, using an adapted version of the model of PCK of Magnusson "et al.". A sample of university professors (n = 6)…

This paper describes a study on research-oriented chemistry teacher education, in which fifty-six advanced, secondary school chemistry student teachers working in teams of two interviewed twenty-eight experienced chemistry teachers. The interviews focussed on teachers' personal viewpoints of how to best teach the different levels of…

The purpose of this qualitative study was to determine agricultural science teacher comfort with a new high school Advanced Life Science: Animal course and determine their perceptions of student impact. The advanced science course is eligible for college credit. The teachers revealed they felt confident of their science background in preparation…

Pedagogical content knowledge, the content-specific knowledge which embodies the aspects of content most germane to its teachability and which is most likely to distinguish the understanding of the content specialist from the pedagogue, has been widely regarded as important for effective teaching of complex subject matter such as science. This…