Leveraging teacher educators' pedagogical approaches for biology terminology instruction : a South African case study

Abstract

Biology education in South Africa faces challenges, as matric students continue to underperform. Diagnostic reports attribute this issue not only to teacher knowledge but also to students' limited comprehension of biology terminology. This study aimed to investigate the pedagogical approaches used by biology teacher educators in addressing terminology during their content module lectures and to suggest ways to enhance the development of pedagogical scientific language knowledge among pre-service and in-service biology teachers. Four biology teacher educators were observed teaching various topics in their content modules. These observations were transformed into vignettes and analysed inductively to uncover different methods of addressing biology terminology. The findings revealed that educators utilized diverse pedagogical approaches, such as representations, to address terminology effectively. This study emphasizes how these pedagogical approaches in initial teacher education programs can be optimized, offering recommendations for equipping both pre-service and in-service teachers with essential pedagogical scientific language knowledge.