Abstract:

This study explores how undergraduate students in a social sciences didactics course turned socially significant issues into brief instructional designs and what their work reveals about their emerging pedagogical content knowledge (PCK). Although PCK has been widely studied in teacher education, much of that research has focused either on other subject areas or on what prospective teachers say they believe about teaching. In social sciences education, we still know relatively little about how students move from a complex public issue to a lesson that is instructionally workable in a school setting. This study takes up that question by examining closely what students designed in response to two realistic teaching situations.

The study was carried out in a department that offers pedagogical preparation but is not organized as a conventional teacher education school. The data came from 90 paired written responses produced as part of a course assignment. Each participant prepared two short micro-lesson plans, each built around a different social issue case. The first focused on social inequality within the European Union and drew on comparative statistical data, while the second dealt with a social media claim about benefits for migrants. In both tasks, students were asked to explain what secondary school learners should understand, identify possible misconceptions, propose an instructional approach, and describe how learning would be assessed. Because the same students responded to both scenarios, the study made it possible to examine whether their pedagogical reasoning remained stable or shifted depending on the topic.

The responses were analyzed using a shared six-dimensional rubric that addressed content focus, student misconceptions, instructional strategies, representational choices, assessment, and overall design coherence. This framework made it possible to compare both overall performance and case-related differences across specific dimensions of design-based PCK. The findings point to an emerging but uneven form of pedagogical reasoning. Overall performance was stronger in the social media misinformation case than in the social inequality case (mean scores 9.32/12 and 8.02/12, respectively). In the second case, students showed stronger pedagogical reasoning, especially in their instructional strategies, representational specificity, and overall coherence. At the same time, anticipation of student misconceptions was relatively strong in both tasks, whereas assessment and representational choices were the least developed dimensions across the dataset.

Taken together, the findings suggest that novice pedagogical reasoning is shaped not only by what students know about teaching, but also by the kind of issue they are asked to teach. Participants seemed more able to build a workable lesson around a concrete, contested, and digitally situated prompt than around a broader structural social problem. The study contributes to current discussions of PCK, lesson design, and practice-based preparation in social sciences education by showing both where early pedagogical reasoning is already promising and where it still needs more explicit support.

Keywords:

Pedagogical content knowledge, social sciences education.