Knowledge Definition, Subject, and Educational Track Level: Perceptions of Secondary School Teachers

This study investigates the effects of subject and track level on the definitions of knowledge used by teachers in secondary education. Responding to 20 scales of an inventory, 202 teachers provided 313 judgments of the characteristics of their own subject as they actually taught it to students of one or more track levels. The first dimension of a principal components solution was interpreted as a contrast between everyday knowledge and academic knowledge. The second dimension involved a contrast between general and specialized knowledge. As far as individual teachers responded to more than one track level, they, generally speaking, maintained a single definition of their subject for all track levels. Subject identity explained most of the differences, but teacher variables were also relevant. If it is allowed to order teachers hierarchically, based on their teacher training and their experience with track levels, then in the group of teachers with the highest level of teacher education and teaching at the highest track level, only the science subjects were judged as extremely hard a n d specialized. In groups of teachers ranking lower, some other subjects such as the foreign languages were judged as relatively hard and specialized, whereas the science subjects were judged less hard and less specialized. The theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed.