Questioning is a critical strategy for science teachers to scaffold students’ exploration and knowledge construction in inquiry-oriented science teaching. In science teacher preparation, open-ended questions asked by teachers are advocated as an advantageous strategy to prompt student thinking. However, insufficient attention has been cast on how science content knowledge embedded in teacher questions contributes to students’ conceptual understanding. Pre-Service Teachers (PST) may formulate a mindset of hands-off inquiry teaching where students could achieve a learning objective by articulating their thoughts without guidance from teachers. In addition, existing methods for the assessment of questioning are mainly qualitative via discourse analysis from limited scenarios, which may yield biased inferences of a teacher’s competency in questioning. Besides, qualitative methods are unwieldy for large-scale analyses due to the complexity of synthesizing discoursal information. In this study, we designed a written instrument for quantitative assessment of PSTs’ pedagogical content knowledge of questioning. We thoroughly introduced the free-response and multiple-choice versions of this instrument and applied it with 108 PSTs. The findings supported the validity and reliability of this instrument. As suggested by this instrument, the participating PSTs were aware of the importance of questioning in inquiry teaching. However, the PSTs’ difficulties with science content knowledge and knowledge of students’ understanding might impede them from determining effective guiding questions to scaffold student learning. Finally, we discussed the potential of this instrument in preparing PSTs’ questioning skills.

提问是科学教师在探究型科学教学中支持学生探索和知识建构的重要策略。在科学教师准备中，提倡教师提出开放式问题，作为促进学生思考的有利策略。然而，对于教师问题中嵌入的科学内容知识如何有助于学生的概念理解却没有引起足够的重视。职前教师（PST）可能会形成一种放手探究式教学的心态，学生可以在没有教师指导的情况下通过表达自己的想法来实现学习目标。此外，现有的提问评估方法主要是通过有限场景的话语分析来定性，这可能会对教师的提问能力产生有偏差的推论。此外，由于合成话语信息的复杂性，定性方法对于大规模分析来说并不实用。在这项研究中，我们设计了一种书面工具，用于定量评估 PST 的提问教学内容知识。我们彻底介绍了该工具的自由回答和多项选择版本，并将其应用到 108 个 PST。研究结果支持了该工具的有效性和可靠性。正如该工具所表明的，参与的 PST 意识到提问在探究教学中的重要性。然而，PST 在科学内容知识和学生理解知识方面的困难可能会阻碍他们确定有效的指导问题来支撑学生的学习。最后，我们讨论了该工具在准备 PST 提问技巧方面的潜力。