Development of the pedagogical content knowledge scale for pre-service teachers: The validity and reliability study

Abstract

The aim of this study is to develop a scale to determinate pre-service teachers’ pedagogical content knowledge. The research was carried out with the 768 pre-service teachers in different universities in Turkey. The study consists of five parts including a literature review, an item pool, experts’ opinions, administration of scale and computing the reliability and validity. While constituting the pool of items, an interview was carried out with 15 pre-service teachers regarding pedagogical content knowledge and 20 teachers were asked to write an essay related to this topic. The draft scale obtained was administered to 768 pre-service teachers and the result of factor analysis, the number of items was reduced to 38. Besides, the Cronbach-Alpha internal integrity coefficient of the final version of the scale was found to be 0.967. After computing the reliability of PCKS, the scale is ready to be used.