Pedagogical Content Knowledge Essay

Teaching is a practical professional knowledge that requires specific competence and expertise in designing and delivering instruction. Shulman (1986) first introduced the concept of pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) that entails understanding how to teach subject matter to students, claiming that teachers needed such knowledge to have professional expertise. With the growing influx of various learning technologies into the classroom, teachers increasingly need to wisely integrate technology into their instruction. Mishra and Koehler (2006) thus expanded the idea of PCK to include this attention to technology with the framework of Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK), claiming that teachers need to develop fluency in each of

In response to the increased interest in teachers’ professional competencies, teacher educators and educational researchers have paid particular attention to the issues on how to help pre-and in-service teachers have such an integrated body of knowledge and, by extension, how to ensure whether teachers are armed with to such competencies from the training and/or programs. In particular, evaluating teacher competencies and the quality of teaching have been paid greater attention to all of education communities coupled with the current accountability policies and initiatives. Many teacher education programs, organization, and teacher education researchers have developed evaluation models and systems to measure the teacher knowledge and skills (e.g., National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, National Education Association). Yet, they are by and large based on the individualistic approach to assessment practice, meaning that the central focus of assessment is on the extent to which an individual

This study specifically focuses on affordances of games as an assessment tool to measure such situative nature of knowledge. Several studies have already pointed out affordances of games as a good assessment tool (e.g., Chin, Dukes, & Gamson, 2009; Loh, 2008; Shute & Ke, 2012, etc.). Particularly, many learning scientists have pointed to the fact that games are good learning environments as well as assessment tools based on the sociocultural theory and situated cognition perspective (Shaffer & Gee, 2012; Schwartz, D.L., & Arena, D.A, 2013, Young et al., 2012). Drawing on such theoretical foundation, this study will elucidate the underlying mechanism of how games can be used as an assessment tool for measuring interactive and situative body of teachers’ competency with