Content-related knowledge of biology teachers from secondary schools: Structure and learning opportunities

Teachers’ content-related knowledge is a key factor influencing the learning progress of students. Different models of content-related knowledge have been proposed by educational researchers; most of them take into account three categories: content knowledge, pedagogical content knowledge, and curricular knowledge. As there is no consensus about the empirical separability (i.e. empirical structure) of content-related knowledge yet, a total of 134 biology teachers from secondary schools completed three tests which were to capture each of the three categories of content-related knowledge. The empirical structure of content-related knowledge was analyzed by Rasch analysis, which suggests content-related knowledge to be composed of (1) content knowledge, (2) pedagogical content knowledge, and (3) curricular knowledge. Pedagogical content knowledge and curricular knowledge are highly related (rlatent = .70). The latent correlations between content knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge (rlatent = .48)—and curricular knowledge, respectively (rlatent = .35)—are moderate to low (all ps < .001). Beyond the empirical structure of content-related knowledge, different learning opportunities for teachers were investigated with regard to their relationship to content knowledge, pedagogical content knowledge, and curricular knowledge acquisition. Our results show that an in-depth training in teacher education, professional development, and teacher self-study are positively related to particular categories of content-related knowledge. Furthermore, our results indicate that teaching experience is negatively related to curricular knowledge, compared to no significant relationship with content knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge.