PRE-SERVICE SCIENCE TEACHERS’ PREDICTIONS ON STUDENT LEARNING DIFFICULTIES IN THE DOMAIN OF MECHANICS

Abstract

The ability to predict students’ ideas or performances is commonly recognized as an indicator to measure teachers’ knowledge of student learning difficulties. This research focuses on identifying pre-service science teachers’ knowledge of student learning difficulties on Mechanics, as well as comparing pre-service science teachers’ predictions to student reasoning on the causes of their learning difficulties. The populations consist of 479 pre-service science teachers and 1,020 students taking physics as a separate science course. Two versions of the questionnaires are designed, with teacher- and student- oriented questions separately. From the results, inconsistencies are observed between two groups of populations. Pre-service science teachers either over- or under-predict student learning difficulties in some special domains. The results show that the physics content knowledge factor attracts great attention from both students and pre-service science teachers as the cause of student learning difficulties. The research results are important for pre-service science teachers to realize the gap between their own perspectives and students’ actual learning difficulties. Keywords: mechanics domain, students` knowledge, pre-service science teachers’ predictions, student learning difficulties.