Changing student's attitudes about teaching in a science course for teachers

Teacher education programs generally have different courses designed to give pre-service teachers multiple opportunities to develop as teachers. Science content courses, general methods courses, and field experiences help the pre-service teacher to begin to develop pedagogical content knowledge (PCK). However, research has established that one of the difficulties for pre-service science teachers is the disconnect between how they have learned their science content and how they are expected to teach that science content to K-12 students. Science content courses for pre-service teachers can be enhanced when content-specific best practices are incorporated, modeled, and made explicit. We have studied the effect of modeling content-specific best practices in a physics content course at The University of Dayton by assessing the students' content knowledge and attitudes towards teaching both before and after the course. The results of our study will be presented in this talk.