Assessing teachers' pedagogical content knowledge: Item development issues

The work of Lee Shulman and his colleagues in the Teacher Assessment Program, supported by the Carnegie Corporation, has led to new conceptions of teaching and teacher assessment (Shulman, 1986, 1987a, 1987b). A key feature of these new conceptions is the proposition that pedagogical content knowledge is an important category of the knowledge base for teaching (Shulman, 1987a). This article describes some issues related to the development of test items to assess pedagogical content knowledge for an elementary teacher licensure test, the Connecticut Elementary Education Certification Examination. Following a brief description of the exam, pedagogical content knowledge is defined. Next is a discussion of three issues that arose when attempting to develop a teacher licensure test that includes assessment of pedagogical content knowledge. Finally, a number of item types that seem to be useful for assessing pedagogical content knowledge are described briefly.