Developing pedagogical content knowledge of science teachers through action research: A case study from Pakistan

This study was undertaken to review and analyze a M.Ed. thesis in science education based in a private high school in Karachi and present an analysis of the thesis report to understand the development of a science teacher’s Pedagogical Content Knowledge. As mentioned earlier this study was undertaken by Khan a M.Ed. student and second author of this paper. He had chosen to use inquiry to teach physics in the school classroom and study his own practice using action research. Khan teaches in a private school in Gilgit-Baltistan province of Pakistan and hence chose a private high school as the site of his study. As the M.Ed. thesis is as yet not available through international databases, hence a brief abstract of the study is attached in the Appendix (see appendix A).

In this paper the major analysis was undertaken by the first author who is also the supervisor of the M.Ed. thesis written by Khan the second author. In preparation to write this paper the dissertation was read and re-read in detail to understand the development of the four elements of PCK as given by Carlsen (1999, p. 136): (a) Students’ common misconceptions (b) specific science curricula (c) Topic specific instructional strategy, and (d) purposes for teaching science. Within this broad framework comments and codes in the margins were written which were later collated into categories subsumed under these four major sub-topics (Miles & Huberman, 1994). However, codes were also assigned to aspects of the study that fell outside these categories to capture idiosyncratic and indigenous understanding of PCK development.