Nixon Ryan S, Bailey Elizabeth Gibbons
Department of Teacher Education, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah, United States of America.
Department of Biology, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah, United States of America.
PLoS One. 2025 Mar 19;20(3):e0320137. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0320137. eCollection 2025.
It is important for elementary teachers to understand the content they are responsible for teaching their students, known as content knowledge. In the content area of science, elementary teacher preparation programs often expect preservice teachers to develop content knowledge in college science courses completed prior to entering the program. These college science courses are often general education courses, not specifically designed for preservice elementary teachers. General education courses may not be adequately serving preservice elementary teachers. The purpose of this study is to explore the impact of general education science courses on preservice elementary teachers, as compared to other students at the same institution. We collected student grades in six different general education courses across ten years of instruction, resulting in a data set with 195860 grades. These data were analyzed using linear mixed modeling to predict course grades in each of the individual courses. Overall, these findings indicate that elementary education majors in general education courses are receiving grades similar to students in most other majors. Notably, elementary education majors received grades comparable to STEM majors in Biology, while scoring worse than STEM majors in Physical Science. These findings assuage some concerns about the impact of general education courses on elementary education majors and suggest that elementary education programs seeking to provide a specialized science course may want to prioritize a course in physical science.
对于小学教师而言，理解他们负责教授给学生的内容（即学科知识）非常重要。在科学学科领域，小学教师预备项目通常期望职前教师在进入该项目之前完成的大学科学课程中掌握学科知识。这些大学科学课程往往是通识教育课程，并非专门为职前小学教师设计。通识教育课程可能无法充分满足职前小学教师的需求。本研究的目的是探讨与同一机构的其他学生相比，通识教育科学课程对职前小学教师的影响。我们收集了十年教学中六门不同通识教育课程的学生成绩，得到了一个包含195860个成绩的数据集。使用线性混合模型对这些数据进行分析，以预测每门课程的成绩。总体而言，这些结果表明，通识教育课程中的小学教育专业学生所获得的成绩与大多数其他专业的学生相似。值得注意的是，小学教育专业学生在生物学课程中获得的成绩与STEM专业学生相当，而在物理科学课程中的得分则低于STEM专业学生。这些发现缓解了一些对通识教育课程对小学教育专业影响的担忧，并表明寻求提供专门科学课程的小学教育项目可能希望优先开设物理科学课程。
