Petrosino, A. J. and Mann, M. J. (2017) Pre-Service Teacher's Knowledge

The following is some work I have been working on for the past number of months. The initial work (poster session) for this will be presented at a conference in Belton, TX in March-- a more extensive and detailed presentation will be made at the American Educational Research Association Meeting in April and -- a draft for publication should be completed somewhere between those who meetings. The results are a little surprising and should be of interest to a number of policy makers, teacher educators, and educational psychologists. We are currently collecting more data this semester which will not be included in the previously mentioned work but will hopefully help us understand this phenomena with a little more clarity. -Dr. Petrosino 


Petrosino, A. and M. J. Mann (2017). Pre-Service Teacher's Knowledge. 

ABSTRACT: This research evaluates the science content knowledge of 133 pre-service teachers with a high disciplinary content background and good pedagogy background (HDB), 121 pre-service teachers with a typical college disciplinary background and high pedagogy background (TDB) and a subpopulation of the university population of 100 students with typical college disciplinary background and no pedagogical background (TDPB). The participants took a survey of released science Praxis questions. A pairwise comparisons were performed using Dunn's (1964) procedure with a Bonferroni correction for multiple comparisons and an effect size was determined. Earth science questions revealed statistically significant differences between the TDB(Mdn=24.00) and HDB(Mdn=25.00) (p=.017) but not between the TDPB(Mdn=25.00) or any TDPB group combination. Science processes questions revealed statistically significant differences between the groups TDB(Mdn=15) and HDB(Mdn=17) (p=.002) and between TDPB(Mdn=15) and HDB(Mdn=17) (p=.000) but not between the TDPB(Mdn=15) and HDB(Mdn=15). Life sciences questions revealed statistically significant differences in groups between the TDB(Mdn=22) and HDB(Mdn=26) (p=.000) and between TDPB(Mdn=24) and HDB(Mdn=26) (p=.000) but not between the TDPB(Mdn=24) and TDB(Mdn=22) and physical science questions revealed statistically significant differences in groups between the TDB(Mdn=33) and HDB (Mdn=35) (p=.000) and between TDPB(Mdn=30) and HDB(Mdn=35) (p=.000) but not between the TDPB(Mdn=30) and TDB(Mdn=33). Students from a program which emphasized high disciplinary knowledge scored best on content and pedagogy questions. Students with no STEM or education major scored as well and sometimes better than the group of students with typical disciplinary content and high pedagogical content knowledge and less than the high disciplinary knowledge students.