Abstract
The content of primary social studies could be described as cultural universals ? domains of human existence that form part of everybody?s experience. Despite that, children do need a skilled instruction helping them to elaborate these topics.
This paper deals with early childhood education students? content knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge regarding the topic of family. We elicited students? concepts related to the topic of family using concept mapping.
Then we performed the content analysis of the obtained concepts. We tried to determine whether pre-service teachers rely on their prior knowledge (including misconceptions) of family or use the knowledge gained in social science classes at the high school or at our university.
We use our findings to discuss the usefulness of scientific perspective in pre-service teacher training and in planning the elementary social science curriculum and instruction.