Abstract
We describe courses designed to help future teachers reflect on and discuss both physics content and student knowledge thereof. We use three kinds of activities: reading and discussing the literature, experiencing research-based curricular materials, and learning to use the basic research methods of physics education research. We present a general overview of the two courses we have designed as well as a framework for assessing student performance on physics content knowledge and one aspect of pedagogical content knowledge---knowledge of student ideas---about one particular content area: electric circuits. We find that the quality of future teachers' responses, especially on questions dealing with knowledge of student ideas, can be successfully categorized and may be higher for those with a nonphysics background than those with a physics background.
Highlights
With the growth of physics education research (PER) as a research field [1,2] and the ongoing desire to improve teaching of introductory physics courses using reformbased approaches [3], there has been an opportunity to move beyond an apprenticeship model of learning about PER toward a course-driven structure
We present a general overview of the two courses we have designed as well as a framework for assessing student performance on physics content knowledge and one aspect of pedagogical content knowledge—knowledge of student ideas—about one particular content area: electric circuits
All three of the tasks we have for this section are summarized in a single overarching research question: In a course designed to teach both content and pedagogy, how is future teacher knowledge affected by focused instruction with research-based materials and research literature documentation? In this paper, we present a method of assessment that we feel can be successfully used to address this question
Summary
With the growth of physics education research (PER) as a research field [1,2] and the ongoing desire to improve teaching of introductory physics courses using reformbased approaches [3], there has been an opportunity to move beyond an apprenticeship model of learning about PER toward a course-driven structure. We present a framework for analyzing data on learning of physics content knowledge and of one aspect of pedagogical content knowledge—what conceptual difficulties a teacher might encounter among his or her students when teaching particular content. We apply this framework to a small data set in order to provide a concrete example. All three of the tasks we have for this section are summarized in a single overarching research question: In a course designed to teach both content and pedagogy, how is future teacher knowledge affected by focused instruction with research-based materials and research literature documentation?
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