Despite increasing policy emphasis on improving teacher quality, little is known about how teachers acquire their movement content knowledge in physical education teacher education (PETE). To address this question we examined: (a) movement content courses designed to teach K-12 physical education content in the PETE curriculum, (b) the purpose of the movement content courses, (c) the focus of the movement content course syllabi, and (d) pedagogical tasks used to teach movement content knowledge. Data were collected from websites, program coordinators, and course syllabi in 26 PETE programs and analyzed using descriptive statistics or one-way chi-square test. A primary conclusion from this study is that not a lot of common content knowledge is taught in the PETE curriculums we examined. A second conclusion is that specialized content knowledge does not represent a significant focus in the movement content classes. These findings both support and challenge current policy initiatives that address teacher quality in PETE.While poor content knowledge (CK) is often lamented by teacher educators at conferences and by researchers in their discussion sections of their papers, there are few studies that have directly measured CK (Ward, Li, Kim, & Lee, 2012). 60Kim, Lee, Ward, and Li Studies that have examined CK have focused their measures on health-related fitness knowledge of teachers. Miller and Housner (1998) examined health-related fitness knowledge among in-service teachers (n = 23), preservice teachers (n = 54), and graduate students (n = 21) in physical education and exercise physiology. Both in-service and preservice teachers scored poorly on the 40-item knowledge test with mean scores below 66%. Castelli and Williams (2007) studied 73 middle school physical education teachers who were very confident in their knowledge of health-related fitness, yet they did not meet the standards expected of ninth grade students. Disch, Santiago, and Morales (2012) recently reported scores for preservice (n = 89) and in-service (n = 61) teachers at 54.8% and 57.5% respectively on their 40-item health-related fitness knowledge instrument.

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