THE ROLE OF MENTORING IN DEVELOPING PRE-SERVICE TEACHERS’ PEDAGOGICAL CONTENT KNOWLEDGE Ümran Betül Cebesoy 1 1 Usak University, Usak, Turkey Pre-service science teachers should be graduated with sufficient subject matter knowledge and pedagogic knowledge to teach science to their students. Altogether, pedagogic content knowledge of teachers refers a specific type of knowledge that teachers know about what to teach and how to teach. Educative mentoring is a way that that help pre-service teachers to develop pedagogic content knowledge (PCK). In this study, how mentoring process influence pre-service science teachers’ development of PCK. The study was designed as case study. Five pre-service science teachers participated in the study. Primary data source involved the use of Content Representations (CoRes) and transcripts of audio-recorded interviews with pre-service teachers (PSTs) during Cell Reproduction unit, specifically mitosis and meiosis contexts, video recordings and self- reflection papers. PSTs prepared CoRes and developed their CoRes with mentor’s online and face-to-face feedbacks. After mentoring process and revisions in original CoRes, PSTs practiced their CoRes in classrooms settings and their micro teaching sessions were video recorded. Results revealed that sufficient scaffolding in the development of CoRes influenced novice teachers’ PCK development. Moreover, results also revealed that while PSTs have sufficient content knowledge, they had difficulties in knowledge of curriculum (e.g., objectives about meiosis and mitosis and their relation to other dimensions reflected in the curriculum including science process skills, science, technology and society dimensions), knowledge of students’ understanding (e.g., students’ misconceptions, prior knowledge about meiosis and mitosis concepts), and knowledge of assessment (e.g., specific ways of ascertaining students’ specific misconceptions). Even they knew instructional strategies, however, they did not know how to synthesize instruction strategies with the curriculum objectives and choose specific strategies to teach specific content. This kind of educative mentoring helped PSTs to connect different PCK components in their CoRes and in their classroom teaching. Keywords: pedagogical content knowledge, pre-service science teachers, educative mentoring INTRODUCTION Teaching science to the students require experience and the teacher preparation programs aim to provide opportunity to pre-service teachers (PSTs) in order to develop their teaching experience and preparing them for reals classrooms settings. Educative mentoring plays a crucial role in teacher preparation programs (Abed & Abd-El Khalick, 2015, Barnett & Friedrichsen, 2015). While educative mentoring was reported to improved and develop their pedagogical knowledge and their understanding of science curriculum, this kind of feed-backs and guidance helped PSTs’ to improve their science teaching (Abed & Abd-El Khalick, 2015). Moreover, educative mentoring process supports PSTs’ development of pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) (Abed & Abd-El Khalick, 2015, Barnett & Friedrichsen, 2015). PCK consists of five domains as orientation to science teaching, knowledge of students’ understanding, knowledge of assessment and knowledge of instructional strategies (Magnusson, Krajcik & Borko, 1999). On the other hand, existing studies reported that novice teachers and pre-service teachers who were about to teach in real classrooms were lacked of sufficient in these PCK components (Loughran, Berry & Mulhall, 2012; Williams & Lockley, 2012). Existing studies about PSTs’ PCK components reported that PSTs lacked content knowledge (Bektas, 2015, Williams & Lockley, 2012), and pedagogical knowledge (Bektas, 2015). In PCK instruction, researchers commonly used Content Representations (CoRes) and/or Professional- experience Repertoires (PaPers) to improve teachers’ and PSTs’ PCK (Aydın et al. 2013; Lehane & Bertram, 2015; Loughran et al. 2008; Hume & Berry, 2011). While Loughran et al. (2008) reported use of