What Kind of Knowledge Makes Science Teachers Most Effective?

“Everybody wants teachers to be knowledgeable,” say Philip Sadler, Gerhard Sonnert, Harold Coyle, Nancy Cook-Smith, and Jaimie Miller (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics) in this article in American Educational Research Journal. “Yet there is little agreement on exactly what kinds of knowledge are most important for teachers to possess.” To find out, they tested the knowledge of 181 middle-school physical science teachers and the learning of 9,556 of their students at several points during a school year. Here are their conclusions:

• The teacher’s subject-matter knowledge is an important predictor of student learning. “That effective teachers must know the concepts they teach may sound like a truism,” say Sadler et al., “but empirical evidence has been rather elusive in prior studies.” However, this kind of knowledge goes only so far. Here’s the more intriguing finding:

• Teachers who are able to predict students’ misconceptions and wrong answers are more effective than teachers who can’t. The researchers asked teachers to identify which test items students would get wrong; teachers who did this well got better achievement results than those who didn’t.

In other words, conclude the authors, “A teacher knowing only the scientific ‘truth’ appears to have limited effectiveness. It is better if a teacher also has a model of how students tend to learn a particular concept, particularly if there is a common belief that may make acceptance of the scientific view or model difficult… This… may allow teachers to construct experiences, demonstrations, experiments, or discussions that make students commit to and then test their own ideas.” 

“The Influence of Teachers’ Knowledge on Student Learning in Middle School Physical Science Classrooms” by Philip Sadler, Gerhard Sonnert, Harold Coyle, Nancy Cook-Smith, and Jaimie Miller in American Educational Research Journal, October 2013 (Vol. 50, #5, p. 1020-1049), http://aer.sagepub.com/content/early/2013/03/06/0002831213477680.abstract

From the Marshall Memo