Aps-ajp-11-1001-Book indb

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 developed 
questions 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 
knowledge.
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Summary: Etkina
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Teacher Education in Physics