Ravit Golan Duncan is an assistant professor at the Graduate School of Education and the School of Environmental and Biological Sciences at Rutgers University. She completed her doctoral degree in Learning Sciences at Northwestern University. As a doctoral student she was part of the National Science Foundation Center for Curriculum Materials in Science and her dissertation research involved the study of student learning in genetics. She also has a M.Sc degree in Biological Sciences from the University of Illinois at Chicago.  Ravit Duncan is currently a National Academy of Education Postdorctoal Fellow and a Knowles Science Teaching Foundation Research Fellow. Her research interests include teacher education and teacher learning, the design of learning environments to support science learning, and the development of cognitive models of student reasoning in complex science domains.  

Project Summary
Pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) is arguably the most important type of knowledge for subject-matter teaching. Although PCK is a critical ingredient for effective teaching, we know little about how it develops over time during teacher preparation or how the various elements of such a preparation program contribute to its development (Cochran-Smith & Ziechner, 2005). To develop better preparation programs we need to understand how PCK develops--we need to characterize the learning progression for PCK. Learning progressions map out a trajectory of learning over extended periods of time and provide guidelines for supporting learners as they advance in their understanding. Thus far, learning progressions have been used to describe children's learning trajectories for particular science concepts.  These learning progressions are a powerful idea that can be used in the field of teacher education. This project developments and validates a learning progression for PCK of preservice secondary science teachers. The learning progression focuses on the development of teachers' understandings of and engagement in science teaching practices that foster scientific model building and argumentation skills.  To empirically validate the progression I used microgenetic methods to conduct a fine-grained and detailed analyses of the moment-by-moment changes in preservice teachers' knowledge and practices and the influence of particular pedagogies and activities on teachers' learning and development over time.

"We have hundreds of teacher education programs and they are all done differently. In my work I research how teachers learn in preparation programs in order to isolate what works so that we can develop more effective preparation programs."