Welcome to our video! Thank you for taking the time to watch our video and comment on the research and development work we’ve been doing to support elementary science teacher educators and the preservice teachers they work with. We are excited to share with you the work that we’ve been doing to help build and assess elementary preservice teachers’ content knowledge for teaching (CKT) in one science content area: matter and its interactions. During the first two years of the project, we’ve been busy working to develop a set of instructional materials – what we call CKT Packets – for elementary teacher educators to use as part of the elementary science content and methods courses and a CKT matter summative assessment instrument to measure the preservice teachers’ CKT over time. We look forward to hearing from you with any questions, comments, or ideas about how the field might use these types of CKT tools in teacher education and professional development settings.

I'm curious how you are building in ways to support preservice elementary teachers' ability to apply ideas about matter and its interactions in the context of different crosscutting concepts, such as cause and effect, mechanism and explanation, or patterns, or systems and system models. 

I enjoyed your video. It sounds like the packets are a great resource for pre-service teachers to deepen their understanding of important science concepts and how to teach them. Have you thought about making these packets available to in-service teachers? I'm wondering if teachers might be able to use the packets in a professional learning community.

I am curious as to how you see the materials being used.  Unlike in math, in many places, preservice elementary teachers often do not take content courses specifically designed at understanding elementary science ideas as a much deeper and fundamental level required to teach it.  This is probably why starting elementary report that they feel the least prepared to teach science among all of the subjects they are responsible for.

I like having the assessment particularly in that it seems to a goal of the project to validate the instrument specifically for preservice teachers, as other instruments have focused on inservice teachers mostly in their validation efforts.  I wander if the assessment might be used as a basis for future efforts among policymakers to try and advocate for change in how the future teachers are prepared in science to mirror what is happening in math.

I am curious as to how you see the materials being used.  Unlike in math, in many places, preservice elementary teachers often do not take content courses specifically designed at understanding elementary science ideas as a much deeper and fundamental level required to teach it.  This is probably why starting elementary report that they feel the least prepared to teach science among all of the subjects they are responsible for.

I like having the assessment particularly in that it seems to a goal of the project to validate the instrument specifically for preservice teachers, as other instruments have focused on inservice teachers mostly in their validation efforts.  I wander if the assessment might be used as a basis for future efforts among policymakers to try and advocate for change in how the future teachers are prepared in science to mirror what is happening in math.

Like Billy Jackson, I am interested in learning more about how you see these materials being used given that pre-service elementary teachers generally lack a deep understanding of science concepts and principles. Because not all students learn science the same way, I'm also wondering in what ways you were able to incorporate culturally responsive teaching into the packets?

What a wonderful project, and as I see colleagues such as Deborah H and Sean S at Horizon Research, with ETS, you all have assembled a wonderful team of deep thinkers. I look forward to looking at these assessment tools for elementary pre-service teachers in more detail!

As an aside, and excuse the simplicity of this question before I am able to look at the tasks in more depth for pre-service teachers: How are these tools similar or in part draw upon the notion of Krajcik's "educative instructional materials" for teachers (providing teacher background support in subject matter and pedagogical implementation) or the work of Shulman (year's ago) looking at pedagogical content knowledge within specific disciplines. I see some synergy, and it may be as simple as it is an "assessment task" for pre-service teachers!

Very exciting and needed project! Thank you for sharing.

Thank you for your kind words Albert. If you want to take a look at the current CKT packets and example CKT matter assessment items, you can do so at our project's website at cktscience.org. You'll need to register for a free account to view the packets and sample items.

In response to your questions, in the design of the packets we did take up the idea of educative instructional materials -- but for teacher educators! That is what we hope is part of the contribution of this work to the larger field. On the cktscience.org website, you can read more about the various design heuristics and educative features we've incorporated into the CKT packets. In addition, many of the CKT matter items require teachers to leverage their pedagogical content knowledge -- particularly their knowledge of students' ideas and knowledge of instructional strategies -- in this content area. Those are great connections to the work that we are doing on this project. 

I enjoyed your video and think the work you are doing with pre-service teachers is so needed.  So the focus is on content, but it seems like, since these are situated in practice, there would be some pedagogical knowledge benefits, too? What do you see?  (I know that's not the focus, but I got curious as I watched, especially as your advisor Sean Smith brought it up, too.)  

Great job!

Our work is focused at the intersection of content and practice. To build and measure the preservice teachers' CKT in this area, we focus on how they leverage their content knowledge to engage in science teaching practices (e.g., eliciting student ideas; selecting instructional resources to address specific learning goals; etc.)-- or what we refer to as the 'Work of Teaching Science.' As part of the CKT matter assessment development process, we conducted cognitive interviews with almost 80 preservice teachers to examine how these items functioned and to determine the knowledge that teachers used to respond to each item. Overwhelmingly we found that the teachers had to both attend to and draw upon aspects of the content and aspects of content teaching in order to successfully respond to the CKT matter items, which suggests these item types measure more than only content knowledge alone and having teachers interact with these types of items within the CKT Packets would also have some pedagogical benefits as well.

Hi Jamie! Nice to see you in this virtual context - hope you and your family are doing well!

Great video, as I would expect. This is super interesting work. I'm wondering about the evaluation component - did you happen to notice any differences in teacher performance? We know so little about how in service PD matters for student performance down the road - I'd be interested in knowing if you could account for any differences in teachers' uptake of the materials.

Great seeing your face here!

Hi Kenne! It is great to see you too. Thanks so much for taking a look at our video. Right now we are in the second year of this four year research project. The first two years have been focused on developing these tools so we do not have much evaluation data to share at this point (although we do have a lot of data from our field test, pilots, and cognitive interviews for the CKT matter summative instrument). However, we are gearing up to integrate the tools within elementary science content and method courses starting this fall and plan to examine the extent to which using the CKT Packets helps to improve the preservice teachers' CKT about matter. As part of that work, we will be able to learn more about how both teacher educators and their preservice teachers use, understand, and interact with these materials. The connection to student performance down the road is a good one -- we are not able to examine that connection yet, but hope to in future work!

Thank you for sharing this work.  For the assessment, do you have a resource site? Curious about the types of items, scoring, validity, reliability? 

In the video, was mentioned that CKT has a metacognitive component to connect pedagogical knowledge with content knowledge.  Can you expound on the approach of the CKT framework and any theoretical constructs that undergird its operationalization?