Preservice teachers’ knowledge of interdisciplinary pedagogy: the case of elementary mathematics–science integrated lessons

The purpose of the study is to explore how elementary preservice teachers’ mathematics–science integrated teaching strategies changed as a result of participating in exemplary interdisciplinary activities with multiple themes across school curricula. The participating elementary preservice teachers (n = 28) were recruited for this study from the College of Education students enrolled at a medium-sized southwestern research university in the United States. A qualitative methodology with pre-and-post data collection from open-ended surveys was used in the current study to explore the development of preservice teachers’ mathematics teaching strategies with connections to science themed activities before and after an 8-week intervention. In general, the results from the pre-and-post surveys revealed that the preservice teachers’ interdisciplinary knowledge of using science-themed activities as instructional approaches for teaching mathematics had remarkable changes across all four science content areas including physics, chemistry, biology, and environmental and space science. This study provided additional empirical evidence on how contextualized mathematics educational activities, in the current case using the association between science and mathematics, can be used as effective teacher education resources for developing teachers’ capacity for designing mathematics lessons.