Preparing Pre-Service Physics Teachers to Diagnose Students' Conceptions Not Covered by Physics Education Textbooks

TL;DR

This study develops and tests a learning environment to help pre-service physics teachers diagnose student misconceptions not covered in textbooks, focusing on improving their diagnostic skills and identifying learning barriers.

Contribution

The paper introduces a novel learning environment for pre-service physics teachers to practice diagnosing unlisted student conceptions, addressing a gap in existing physics education training.

Findings

Participants experienced varying difficulty levels in the environment.

Main difficulty was connecting content knowledge with pedagogical content knowledge.

Learning barriers were identified in the diagnostic process.

Abstract

To date, there is a lack of research on learning environments for pre-service physics teachers that allow them to learn and practise diagnosing students' conceptions that are (currently) not covered in physics education textbooks (e.g. students' conceptions about viscosity). In this study, we developed and piloted such a learning environment, which was implemented and piloted twice in a seminar for pre-service physics teachers. As coping with a diagnostic process is particularly demanding for pre-service physics teachers, our accompanying research aims to identify learning barriers within our developed learning environment. The results indicate that the participants experience the learning environment with varying degrees of difficulty. One main difficulty for pre-service physics teachers seems to be in interconnecting their content knowledge with their pedagogical content knowledge in the diagnostic process.