What We Know About Deepening Teachers' Content Knowledge: Engaging Teachers with Developing Conceptual Maps of Mathematics/Science Content

Research on Engaging Teachers with Developing Conceptual Maps of Science Content

Professional learning opportunities for teachers of science have increasingly focused on deepening teachers' content knowledge. One strategy sometimes used to deepen teachers' content knowledge is engaging them in developing conceptual maps of content targeting specific science concepts. Developing conceptual maps involves working with a scientific concept or concepts and identifying relevant ideas that make up the concept(s), and the relationships among those ideas. When engaged in this task, teachers may be asked to identify both the ideas and their relationships, or they may be provided with the ideas and asked to focus on just the relationships. One research study (Shymansky et al., 1993) identified in a review of research on deepening teacher content knowledge investigated a professional development program that included this strategy for science teachers. (See Table 1.)

		Science Content
Name of Study (Click on the study to read a description of how the intervention engaged teachers with developing conceptual maps of science content.) [PDF 20K]
A study of changes in middle school teachers' understanding of selected ideas in science as a function of an in-service program focusing on student perceptions (Shymansky et al., 1993)	4-9				•

Findings from Research

The Shymansky and colleagues (1993) study engaged teachers with the development of conceptual maps of content and reported at least some positive results on participating teachers' content knowledge. Although the study was not designed to systematically investigate this particular strategy for deepening teacher content knowledge, there was some support regarding its effectiveness in deepening teachers' science content knowledge. Some of the participating teachers' incorrect prior ideas changed over the course of the intervention, but some participants expressed new misconceptions at the end of the intervention.

Shymansky and colleagues (1993) analyzed teachers' concept maps to assess changes in understanding of 42 4th through 9th grade teachers at three points in time over six months: at a spring orientation meeting before a one-week summer workshop, immediately after the summer workshop, and again after follow-up activities during the fall. The teachers divided themselves among 10 topic teams, ranging from astronomy to electricity to ecology.

The teachers' maps were rated by advanced doctoral students in science departments. To limit biases, raters were not aware of the time each content map was produced nor which teacher produced each one. The raters identified valid and invalid propositions depicted on the maps. The study found that "all postfall valid proposition mean scores exceeded the spring mean scores, but weighted invalid mean scores in 8 of 10 topic areas did not change or even increased. These data suggest that the teachers successfully incorporated new valid propositions in their conceptual frameworks, but did not necessarily discard or discount all previously held misconceptions" (p. 747-748). Only three of the ten topic teams (heredity, substance abuse, and ecology) evidenced consistent growth across the three time points. Valid proposition means in the other seven areas did not change significantly from spring to summer or from summer to fall. It is unclear whether the differential outcomes are related to the specific topics, whether the small group of teachers who participated in those three topics differed from the other teachers, or whether the experts in charge of the various topics were differentially effective.

Analysis of the conceptual maps was a novel way to assess teacher content knowledge. Although the inter-rater reliability process was adequately described, validation processes were not described in detail, which is a particular concern when using a new method of assessment. In addition, teachers participated in the study on a voluntary basis, so generalizability of the findings must be considered in this light.

For the research on engaging teachers with developing conceptual maps of science content bibliography, click here. [PDF 7K]

The study described above was part of a more inclusive review of research on experiences intended to deepen teachers' science content knowledge. For more information, you are invited to read a summary of research on experiences intended to deepen teachers' science content knowledge, click here. [PDF 134K]