Exploring Pedagogical Content Knowledge of Teaching Assistants Using the Test of Understanding Graphs in Kinematics

TL;DR

This study assesses how well physics graduate TAs understand common student difficulties with kinematics graphs, revealing gaps in their pedagogical content knowledge despite some ability to identify student misconceptions.

Contribution

It evaluates the pedagogical content knowledge of physics graduate TAs regarding student difficulties with kinematics graphs using the TUG-K assessment.

Findings

Graduate students perform better than random guessing in identifying student difficulties.

They often fail to recognize many common student misconceptions.

Their ability to identify difficulties varies with context.

Abstract

The Test of Understanding Graphs in Kinematics (TUG-K) is a multiple choice test developed by Beichner in 1994 to assess students' understanding of kinematics graphs. Many of the items on the TUG-K have strong distractor choices which correspond to students' common difficulties with kinematics graphs. Instruction is unlikely to be effective if instructors do not know the common difficulties of introductory physics students and explicitly take them into account in their instructional design. We evaluate the pedagogical content knowledge of first year physics graduate students enrolled in a teaching assistant (TA) training course related to topics covered in the TUG-K. In particular, for each item on the TUG-K, the graduate students were asked to identify which incorrect answer choice they thought would be most commonly selected by introductory physics students if they did not know the correct answer after instruction in relevant concepts. We used the graduate student data and the data from Beichner's original paper for introductory physics students to assess the relevant pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) of the graduate students. We find that, although the graduate students, on average, performed better than random guessing at identifying introductory student difficulties on the TUG-K, they did not identify many common difficulties that introductory students have with graphs in kinematics even after traditional instruction. In addition, we find that the ability of graduate students to identify the difficulties of introductory students is context dependent.