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A Grand Rubric for Measuring Science Teachers’ Pedagogical Content Knowledge

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Abstract

Rubrics are increasingly used to differentiate the quality of science teachers’ pedagogical content knowledge (PCK), both qualitatively and quantitatively. Well-designed PCK rubrics can guide the judgement of PCK quality for valid assessment. This chapter considers the possibility of a “grand rubric” that allows measurement of different variants of PCK as depicted in the Refined Consensus Model (RCM). To achieve this goal, the chapter first reviews the characteristics of rubrics in current use in the science education field. It examines the critical considerations in the construction of a grand rubric through an analysis of an expert discussion group. Based on this analysis, the paper proposes a grand rubric and describes its layout and characteristics. The grand rubric is generic in nature and can be customised for use with different science content topics as well as for measurement of specific variants of PCK in the RCM, including individual science teachers’ personal or enacted PCK (pPCK and ePCK) and the collective PCK (cPCK) of a group of science teachers.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The eight characteristics are: (1) primary research focus of the articles; (2) PCK model and components/categories; (3) PCK variant(s) explored; (4) the data sources; (5) the rubric development process; (6) the structures and purpose of the rubric; (7) the quality indicators for PCK; and (8) the scoring process.

  2. 2.

    The eleven summit members involved in the rubric group discussion were Alicia Alonzo, Julie Gess-Newsome (USA), Amanda (Mandi), Berry (Australia), Jared Carpendale (New Zealand), Kennedy Chan (Hong Kong), Sophie Kirschner, Sven Liepertz (Germany), Elizabeth Mavhunga, Marissa Rollnick (South Africa), Pernilla Nilsson (Sweden), and Christopher (Chris) Wilson (UK, based in the USA).

  3. 3.

    For the purpose of clarity, in the following, the terms static PCK and dynamic PCK will be used below.

  4. 4.

    CoRe stands for Content Representation—an array to portray PCK structured by big ideas related to a topic with responses to key pedagogical prompts.

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Correspondence to Kennedy Kam Ho Chan .

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Chan, K.K.H., Rollnick, M., Gess-Newsome, J. (2019). A Grand Rubric for Measuring Science Teachers’ Pedagogical Content Knowledge. In: Hume, A., Cooper, R., Borowski, A. (eds) Repositioning Pedagogical Content Knowledge in Teachers’ Knowledge for Teaching Science. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-5898-2_11

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-5898-2_11

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