Summary: Thompson, et al.Summary of “Preparing future teachers to anticipate student diffi culties
in physics in a graduate-level course in physics, pedagogy, and education
research,” John R. Thompson, Warren M. Christensen, and Michael C.
Wittmann, pp. 91–102.There now exists a decades-long record of physics educa-
tion research (PER) on student learning and on the evalua-
tion of reform-based curricular materials. The major results
of PER have been used to create a course at the University
of Maine that moves beyond the current apprenticeship or
internship models for preparing teachers, to one that also pre-
pares teachers and researchers to use the results of PER. This
graduate-level course, “Integrated Approaches in Physics
Education,” is designed to help the participants—primarily
future secondary teachers and future academic faculty—learn
about PER from three different perspectives: research into
student learning, development of instructional materials based
on this research, and documentation of the effectiveness of
these materials.
Results from PER suggest that one must prepare future
physics teachers to have an awareness of how their students
might think about various topics, as well as an awareness of
the kinds of curricular materials available to help guide stu-
dents to the proper scientifi c community consensus thinking
about the relevant physics. These are components of what
is known as “pedagogical content knowledge” (PCK). In
the broader science education research literature, research
on science teachers’ PCK has focused on the nature and the
development of PCK in general, rather than investigating
teachers’ PCK about specifi c topics in a discipline. The course
described in this article is designed to promote the develop-
ment of content-specifi c PCK, in part, by improving future
teachers’ knowledge of student ideas (KSI) in physics.
This article describes an investigation of future teachers’
thinking about student ideas in physics, and it discusses the
design of a teacher-preparation curriculum that has been
explicitly informed by physics education research. The
authors believe that this work will contribute to improving
future teachers’ understanding of students’ ideas, an under-
standing that has proved to be important for effective learning
and teaching of physics. The work described here addresses
only the most basic elements of instruction on KSI. Learners
are fi rst asked to answer, for themselves, carefully developedquestions that probe conceptual understanding. They are then
asked to supply an answer they think would be consistent with
the most common incorrect student response and to explain
how a student might be thinking when giving this incorrect
line of reasoning.
The authors present results on student learning of physics
concepts and of PER literature in the context of electric circuits
(batteries and bulbs in parallel and series circuits). Data come
from exam questions and ungraded quizzes answered over
multiple years of instruction. Prospective teachers’ knowl-
edge of physics and their pedagogical content knowledge are
examined in terms of their understanding of common student
diffi culties with the physics, as well as their understanding of
which existing curricula are most likely to help students learn
the appropriate physics. Results for prospective teachers both
with and without a physics background are compared.
A preliminary analysis suggests that the course provides future
teachers with tools to anticipate student thinking, to incorporate
student ideas about the content into their teaching and assess-
ment, and to analyze student responses with various types of
assessments. All the students in the courses have been able to
learn the physics content if they did not already begin the course
knowing it. Although content understanding has typically been
greater among the physics students, the results suggest that the
non-physics students may be better able to identify which instruc-
tional materials might best help students.
While the sample size at this time is still small, the results
nevertheless demonstrate the utility of the methodology. The
fi ndings are consistent with aspects of pedagogical content
knowledge espoused by many different researchers in science
and mathematics education. These aspects are not explicitly
taught or assessed in most science and mathematics educa-
tion research or physics teacher preparation programs. The
course design and corresponding research begin to address
the need for the PER community to engage in helping future
teachers develop both content knowledge, and the knowledge
of student ideas that is an essential part of pedagogical content
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