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Preservice Teachers, Physics, Science Teachers, Pedagogical Content Knowledge, Teaching Experience, Teacher Competencies, Teacher Education Programs, and Program Effectiveness

This study identifies proficiency levels in pre-service physics teachers' pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) and reveals how teacher education can promote transitions into higher proficiency. Teacher education plays a fundamental role in supporting pre-service teachers' PCK development. Proficiency levels are a powerful source when evaluating this PCK development because they characterize what learners are likely to be able to know on a specific level. Previous research has presented a model of proficiency levels in pre-service physics teachers' PCK; however, evidence for the model's validity is still lacking. According to the Refined Consensus Model of PCK, factors such as teachers' content knowledge (CK), their teaching experience, and their beliefs about teaching and learning science promote PCK development. Thus, understanding how and when pre-service physics teachers' CK, teaching experience, and beliefs contribute to their proficiency can bring insights into how teacher education can promote PCK development. To address this issue, N = 427 observations of pre-service physics teachers were analyzed. Utilizing the scale anchoring procedure, four different proficiency levels in pre-service physics teachers' PCK were identified. Analyzing these proficiency levels showed that lower levels can be characterized as remembering content-unspecific knowledge, whereas higher levels encompass content-specific strategies to structure and elaborate lessons. Additionally, logistic regression models revealed that pre-service physics teachers' CK is crucial for an increase in PCK proficiency. However, transitions into higher levels of PCK additionally require teaching experience and adequate beliefs about teaching and learning. Thus, our proficiency levels can be used to bring insights into how proficiency in PCK can be supported during teacher education. For example, teacher education should provide courses focusing on the science curriculum and the assessment of student learning to promote pre-service physics teachers' progression in PCK.

Grade 5, Grade 6, Grade 7, Middle School Students, Elementary School Students, Student Interests, Physics, Science Curriculum, Teacher Role, Teacher Effectiveness, and Cognitive Processes

Although promoting student interest is a pivotal educational goal, student interest in science, and particularly in physics, declines substantially during secondary school. This study focused on the long-term development of interest in physics at the lower secondary level (grades 5-7) and examined the role of teaching and teaching quality on the development. In particular, the study investigated the role of whether or not physics was taught in class and the role of perceived teaching quality for classes' interest trajectories. The results provide evidence of declining interest in physics from Grade 5 to 7, with stronger declines from Grade 5 to 6. Whether classes participated in physics teaching or not neither notably reduced nor increased interest in physics. However, several dimensions of perceived teaching quality (in particular, cognitive activation and cognitive support) mitigated the decline in interest.

College Students, Metacognition, Prompting, Academic Achievement, Psychology, Physics, Instruction, Cognitive Processes, Study Habits, Instructional Effectiveness, Self Esteem, Comprehension, Correlation, and New York (New York)

Short metacognitive prompts--like "minute papers"--are simple enough to be widely adopted by instructors. But do they work? We investigate how they affect college students' performance in quantitative (Physics) and qualitative (Psychology) courses, comparing classes which received metacognitive prompts to those that did not. We find significant improvement in performance in Psychology and borderline significant improvement in Physics. While the interventions did not raise students' confidence, interviews with students revealed that the prompts helped them process course material and study for exams. This is one of few studies to directly compare the effectiveness of metacognitive prompts across disciplines.

Elementary School Students, Physics, Academic Achievement, Metacognition, Learning Strategies, Grade 6, Correlation, Teaching Methods, and Science Instruction

The teachers should support students in acquiring knowledge and developing skills thus preparing them to think and learn independently. Considering this, the significance of implementing the modified Know-Want-Learn (KWL) teaching strategy, which directs students to perform metacognitive activities, becomes more evident. Quasi-experimental research was used to investigate the correlation between elementary school students' physics performance and metacognition regarding the use of a modified KWL strategy. The study included an experimental and control group and a pre-test and post-test research method. Two physics knowledge tests and a questionnaire on metacognition were distributed to the 110 sixth-grade students in the elementary school. Results indicated that statistically significant correlation existed between students' performance in physics and metacognition when the traditional teaching method was used. At the same time, there was no statistically significant correlation when a modified KWL strategy was used. It can be indicated that, while addressing the problem of poor students' performance, an improvement can be seen in case of the metacognition.

Physics, Self Concept, Academic Ability, Self Concept Measures, Student Motivation, Academic Achievement, Psychometrics, High School Students, Student Attitudes, Factor Analysis, Foreign Countries, Validity, Knowledge Level, and Iran

The academic self-concept (ASC) is a domain-specific construct, which plays an influential role in academic motivation and choices. Although some ASC models and instruments have been developed for mathematics and science, none have been specifically designed to measure the physics ASC. Therefore, this study focuses on designing and validating a model for measuring the physics ASC. In the proposed model, students' physic academic self-perception is measured by a novel instrument called Physics Academic Self-Concept Inventory (PASCI) based on domain-specific learning targets. The major physics learning targets considered in the PASCI design are physics knowledge, attitudes toward physics, and physics-related skills. Confirmatory factor analysis and psychometric methods are used to test and validate the proposed model and the PASCI instrument on the data collected from 861 male and female students attending secondary high schools in Iran. The results indicate that the devised model has appropriate fit measures and robust structural validity so that in multiple group analysis, model parameters are invariant. The author suggests that the idea of physics ASC should be modeled as a hierarchical and multidimensional structure based on physics learning targets to be effectively helpful to physics education researchers and teaching physics in classrooms.

Foreign Countries, Mathematics, Physics, Relationship, Scientific Concepts, Mathematical Concepts, College Students, Beliefs, Student Attitudes, Professional Personnel, and Taiwan

The effectiveness of mathematics in physics makes people take for granted the intimate connection between both disciplines. However, history shows that this is not always the case, because mathematics has played a minor role, not only in Aristotelian physics in ancient Greece, but also in Confucian and neo-Confucian science in ancient China. The objective of this study is to discuss the role of mathematics in physics and propose a structuralistic view as an epistemological stance to interpret this role. This paper opens with a brief historical overview on the relationship between mathematics and physics, followed by a report on Taiwanese college students' work on and responses to an activity simulating Galileo's inclined plane experiment, in order to investigate in what way they analyzed the data and to what extent this activity enriched the affective, knowledge-oriented, and historical aspects of their thinking. Additionally, an investigation of a mathematician's and a physicist's beliefs was conducted to search for an epistemological stance that reveals the relationship between mathematics and physics. The study suggests that a structuralist view may be appropriate for promoting students' learning and their epistemological interpretations of mathematics and physics.

Foreign Countries, Teacher Educators, Physics, Identification (Psychology), Secondary School Teachers, Professional Identity, Professional Autonomy, Role Conflict, Teacher Role, and Chile

This study examines the sense of agency developed through the hybrid identities of two Chilean educators working across a university physics department (as teacher educators), a secondary school (as part-time teachers), and a self-organized professional community to which they belong. A Freirean conceptualization of agency together with border crossing and hybridity was used as theoretical frameworks. Data were collected through biographical interviews and follow-up conversations. A critical narrative approach was used for analysis. Findings suggest that the two physics educators encountered a hegemonic culture of physics education characterized by different hierarchies and tensions, such as the devaluation of pedagogy, lack of spaces for dialogue, and a punitive view of assessment. Nonetheless, evidence showed that by crossing the borders of different communities, the participants problematise their boundaries. Through their hybrid identities position, the participants enact their agency to contest such boundaries bringing new practices particularly to the physics department, such as offering spaces for collaboration, allowing others to cross boundaries between the school and the university, and across science disciplines. It is argued that such identities can provide new learning opportunities for their students and their colleagues. Moreover, evidence showed that the community to which participants belong acts as a space for cultivating hope, stressing the need for collective spaces for rethinking our practices. As such, their hybrid identity position offers a counter-narrative to the idea that university physics departments hold only a traditional and banking view of physics teaching and knowledge. Hence, this study offers evidence of how the two physics educators disrupt the boundaries that limit who the teacher educators are and the practices they engage with, highlighting the need for more schoolteachers contributing to initial teacher education. Such a new actor could offer more narratives for future physics teachers to negotiate their ideas about pedagogy and physics.

Computer Software, Educational Technology, Technology Uses in Education, Teaching Methods, Secondary School Students, Student Attitudes, Scientific Concepts, Science Education, Nonverbal Communication, Physics, and Cognitive Processes

The present study contributes to the understanding of physics students' representational competence by examining specific bodily practices (e.g. gestures, enactment) of students' interaction and constructions of representations in relation to a digital learning environment. We present and analyse video data of upper-secondary school students' interaction with a GeoGebra simulation of friction. Our analysis is based on the assumption that, in a collaborative learning environment, students use their bodies as means of dealing with interpretational problems, and that exploring students' gestures and enactment can be used to analyse their sensemaking processes. This study shows that specific features of the simulation--features connected with microscopic aspects of friction--triggered students to ask what-if and why questions and consequently, to learn about the representation. During this sense-making process, students improvised their own representations to make their ideas more explicit. The findings extend current research on students' representational competence by bringing attention to the role of students' generation of improvised representations in the processes of learning with and about representations.

Preservice Teachers, Physics, Science Teachers, Foreign Countries, Identification (Psychology), Science Instruction, Preservice Teacher Education, Student Attitudes, Teaching Methods, Competence, Performance, Science Interests, Recognition (Psychology), and Indonesia

Identity-based research in physics education has been receiving increased attention in the past few years given the potential of identity in producing novel insights into the ways' students engage in physics. In this study, we examined the development of preservice physics teachers' physics identity through a specific instructional practice: a specially designed course incorporating the use of the multiple representations. Although specific programs and instructional practices have been found to influence the development of physics identity, there is no clear evidence about the kinds of instructional practices that might support its development. To examine the influence of multiple representations on each component of physics identity, we designed and implemented a physics course that used a multiple representation (MR)-based instructional approach with a group of 61 preservice physics teachers at a public university in Indonesia. Data were collected with a pre- and post-questionnaire on physics identity, a conceptual understanding test, and a post-test that examined differences between identity components before and after the course, conceptual understandings, as well as the participants' views about the use of the MR-based instructional approach. The findings revealed a significant improvement of two components of physics identity, namely, competence and interest, and point to the potential of MR-based instruction in physics courses.

Middle School Students, Grade 8, Physics, Science Curriculum, Scientific Concepts, Learning Processes, Conventional Instruction, and Individualized Instruction

This paper re-validates middle school students' learning progression of the concept of buoyancy (Gao et al., 2020) by using two-time point data. The previous study developed a four-level learning progression based on data collected at a single time point using cross-sectional design. This single-time-point model of learning progression calls for a further validation through a longitudinal design focusing on changes in individual students as a result of targeted instruction. In this study, 91 eighth-grade students first learned buoyancy under a traditional pedagogy and took test "A" of buoyancy. Based on results of test "A," the teacher provided a targeted remediation instruction to students. Students then took a second test "B" which was designed as a parallel instrument to test "A." Latent class analysis was conducted to locate students' levels in the learning progression, and a rule space model was employed to diagnose students' concept mastery patterns at each level. The test "A" data provide evidence to support the original learning progression of buoyancy developed by Gao et al. (2020), but the test "B" data suggest two more additional progression sub-levels for the prior study. Together, our findings indicate that one-time point data under the current status quo of teaching might be insufficient to accurately depict pathways of scientific thinking for how students progress from the lower anchor to the upper anchor. We thus argue that it is essential to involve well-designed instruction and collect multi-time-point data that could portray alternative pathways in students' learning progression.

Science Instruction, Physics, Intellectual Disability, Students with Disabilities, Scientific Concepts, Special Education, High School Students, Vocabulary, Concept Formation, Intervention, Program Effectiveness, Student Attitudes, Resource Units, Educational Technology, Electronic Learning, Foreign Countries, Special Schools, Motion, and Greece

Digital Learning Objects (DLOs) as pedagogical complete structures of learning content contribute to science education. DLOs especially in the form of interactive simulations seem to be promising tools in physics teaching and learning for students with intellectual disabilities (ID). This study used an AB single subject design to evaluate the effects of four DLOs on students' learning of transverse waves and simple pendulum motion in a special education high school setting. A functional relationship was found between students' correct responses concerning both scientific terminology and physical phenomena understanding during probe sessions and the DLOs intervention. In addition, a social validity assessment that evaluated students' attitudes on learning, quality, and engagement, showed that the DLOs helped students with ID to acquire physics content. The students also reported satisfaction from using the DLOs. Suggestions for future research include the design of DLOs especially for students with ID.