Abstract
Being a teacher educator, I came across many problems
throughout my teaching experience at St. Margaret’s Institute of
Education Karachi (pseudo name). Some of these problems were
simple and I was able to solve those by using my prior knowledge and
experience. However, some of the problems were complex and I was
unable to solve these satisfactorily even by using my prior knowledge
and past experience. Complex problems were usually dense and
interconnected therefore they developed patterns of regularity and
consistency and hence became quite obvious and noticeable. The
patterns formulated by the problems encouraged me to reflect upon
them and identify the causes of problems. I started keeping a reflective
journal to record distinctive, unexpected as well as pattern forming
events of my Science curriculum studies’ classes. I also recorded my
reflections on each of the recorded events and problems and made
inferences from each of them. I also started consulting research journals
and other library and Internet resources as well as my research
supervisor and critical friend. With this activity I was able to find some
of the root causes of different problems. I isolated one problem which
was intense and affecting a large number of Science students.Most of
the students were weak in Science content knowledge and therefore
were unable to show good performance in most of the class activities,
namely, Science tests, worksheets, presentations and assignments. They
also found difficulty when they went to the schools for teaching
practicum as they could not explain topics well and showed an inability
to handle students’ questions. Some of them even gave wrong
information in answering students’ questions which led to lack of
confidence among student teachers and they could not manage
students’ behaviour very well. These interconnected problems
encouraged me to help student teachers of St. Margaret’s Institute of
Education enhance their Science content knowledge. While working
with student teachers, I had to keep in mind that educational institutes
for teachers place more emphasis on pedagogical content knowledge
rather than on the subject content. It is expected that a focus on subject
content would have occurred prior to their taking Science Curriculum
Studies Unit. Therefore, the anticipation of the teacher educator is that
any focus on content within the unit would be largely in relation to
pedagogical approaches to the transfer of content knowledge. For this
reason, I decided to use the Problem-Based Learning technique
JRRE Vol.2, No1, 2008
67
(Barrows, 1984; Boud, 1985; Boud & Feletti, 1991; Duch, 1995;
Woods, 1985) to enhance student teachers’ Science content knowledge.
The problem mentioned above could not be solved in one or a few
classes. Therefore, I used the Action Research method (Burns, 1997;
Henry & Kemmis, 1985) to enhance student teachers’ Science content
knowledge. There seemed to have successes in terms of enhancing
student teachers’ Science content knowledge. This research had three
cycles and was completed in five months
Martin Thomas. (2008) Using PBL to Enhance Student Teachers’ Science Content Knowledg, Journal of Research and Reflections in Education, Volume 2, Issue 1.
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