2024 Volume 48 Issue 2 Pages 222-233
Pre-service elementary school teachers do not understand the concept of metal. The purpose of this study is to investigate the extent to which students enrolled in teacher training programs have acquired the “knowledge concerning the subject matter” necessary for teaching metals in elementary school science. The results show that their instruction requires improvement. This study revealed four major findings. First, 7.9% of participants correctly identified all five properties of metals. Second, 59.2% of participants answered correctly that all objects that were metals were metals. Third, when students identified an object as a metal, they considered the object to be electrically conductive. Fourth, they distinguished between iron and noniron metals, except for juice cans, and identified that an object containing iron was magnetic, whereas it was nonmagnetic if it did not contain iron. Based on these findings, the study suggests three strategies to improve teacher training programs for elementary school teachers: (a) encouraging pre-service teachers to recognize the curriculum contents of the five properties of metals in lower and upper secondary school science lessons, (b) encouraging them to think about the metals that are used in objects around them and why they are used in those objects, and (c) helping them recognize that their concept of metals is different from their pupils’ misconceptions.
