The research in this thesis examined the use of a didaktik-based approach to thinking about teaching and learning to the training of pre-service physics teachers in a Malaysian teacher training programme. The process of developing a specific content knowledge (real or true physics) was done through a didaktik analysis of specific physics content, to develop physics content knowledge suitable for schooling, in a particular educational context. Didaktik analysis used as intervention in this study involved: analysing specific physics content as contained in the curriculum specifications and textbooks; analysis of literature on students' alternative conceptions; developing a lesson plan; developing teaching sequences that involve teaching and learning activities, enacting lesson plans and teaching sequence in the microteaching and practicum, and subsequent reflection. Klafki's (2000) model of didaktik analysis was used as the basis of an intervention employed in a physics teaching methods course (TT4133) at the School of Education, University of Malaysia Sabah (UMS). The intervention consisted of the 14 week course: first seven weeks on theoretical aspects of teaching methods, followed the usual course synopsis, but with modifications in content resulting from didaktik analysis, and the remainder dealt with microteaching; and 8 weeks practicum. To illustrate the use of didaktik analysis in the training programme, the specific physics content in the areas of force and motion was provided as an example, showing how this was presented to the pre-service physics teachers in the programme. The researcher began with a conceptual analysis of force and motion as presented in the Malaysian secondary physics curriculum specifications and textbooks. This was followed by analysis of the science education literature on students' alternative conceptions involving force and motion, analysis of textbooks presentations of force and motion, and importantly a synopsis of the history of scientific thinking about force and motion. Subsequently, the pre-service teachers were required to prepare lesson plans aided by the researcher based on the above tasks, and this was followed by the development of a teaching sequence which was intended to be implemented in teaching practice with peers (called microteaching in Malaysia), and after further refinement in the practicum in a real classroom (under supervision). Participants were third year (15 males and 20 females) and fourth year (18 males and 60 females) pre-service physics teachers in their final year of undergraduate studies. The third year cohort consisted of experienced primary school teachers seeking to become secondary school physics teachers via a three-year conversion course. The fourth year cohort had no prior teaching experience, but held degree-level qualifications in physics. Quantitative data were gathered through two tests of conceptual understanding, The Test of Understanding Graph in Kinematics, TUG-K and The Force and Motion Conceptual Evaluation, FMCE tests, and a purpose-designed instrument the Beliefs About Physics Teaching, BAPT questionnaire. Qualitative data were constructed through the inspection of self-written reports about prior physics learning experiences, inspection of assignments on the didaktik analysis of physics, and individual lesson plans. Video recording and field notes made during observations of microteaching and the practicum, examination of 'written reflections' done in the middle of the methods course, during the practicum, and in the final examinations, and interviews and field notes made by the researcher during meetings with the pre-service physics teachers, completed the data corpus. The research findings indicate that generally both cohorts had difficulty understanding kinematics graphs, and weak conceptual understanding of Newtonian concepts. These findings support the findings from the BAPT questionnaire and interviews, which point to perceptions of lack of ability to teach physics, negative attitudes towards teaching specific physics topics at the secondary level, and overall low physics teaching self-efficacy. Overall the findings from the BAPT questionnaire and interviews, before the intervention based on didaktik analysis of physics suggest that these pre-service physics teachers' attitude toward, and beliefs about, physics teaching were based on career interest in teaching, and not on any intrinsic interest in physics or physics teaching as a profession. After the didaktik analysis intervention it seems that the pre-service physics teachers' teaching practices were shaped by their beliefs about, and experiences of, the physics teaching methods course generally, and the didaktik analysis experience in particular. Overall, it seems this part of methods course helped to improve pre-service physics teachers' understanding of specific physics content, improved their attitude-toward-physics and teaching, helped them to identify problems with students' learning of physics concepts, and helped their teaching practice, subsequently making them more confident about teaching secondary school physics. The pre-service physics teachers commented on the value of didaktik analysis and this was evident in the microteaching, but not in lesson plans and teaching sequence used in the practicum. It seems this was as a result of a limited amount and a drive by schools to adhere to curriculum specifications. Overall it seems the introduction of didaktik-based analysis intervention increased participants' confidence to teach secondary school physics and that these pre-service physics teachers have gone some way in developing into reflective practitioners in terms of their experiences of: their own secondary physics learning; their physics methods course, both of which led to a better and deeper understanding of physics and methods course content; and the teaching practices in the microteaching and practicum, both of which gave confidence to teach secondary school physics. Three recommendations are made from this thesis. First, the introduction of a didaktik analysis-based intervention in physics teaching methods courses such as the one in this study, necessitates identification in advance of pre-service physics teachers' attitude toward, and beliefs about physics teaching, along with their attitude-toward-physics and learning, their physics teaching self-efficacy beliefs, and their conceptual understanding of specific physics content. Second, didaktik analysis involving other specific physics content, with other cohorts of pre-service physics teachers, experienced secondary physics teachers, and physicists, is worthy of consideration. Third, the success of the use of a didaktik-based analysis in a physics teaching methods courses requires scaffolding of the teaching sequences employed, and strong support from associate/mentor teachers during the practicum, if didaktik-based teaching is to be realized in the classroom.

Education in South Africa is a national concern and the training and professional development of teachers, especially in science and mathematics, has consequently been prioritised by the National Government. More than 60 percent of the teachers in South Africa are older than 40 years of age, which means that within the next 10-15 years many experienced teachers will exit the system, leaving a younger and less experienced cohort of teachers behind. This study aims to make explicit the learning trajectories of physical sciences teachers, specifically with respect to their knowledge for teaching chemical bonding, in order to support other teachers and thereby accelerating the route to expertise. Learning can be viewed as change, and change has a trajectory. Mapping the learning trajectories, and the significant events that influenced teachers' learning over time, can give insight into how the change had taken place. This study used a mixed methods approach within the pragmatic research paradigm to map learning trajectories for a group of 60 South African physical sciences teachers. Pedagogical content knowledge (PCK), the unique knowledge held by teachers, was used for the theoretical framing of the study. An adapted version of the Model of Teacher Professional Knowledge and Skill, including PCK, was used as an analytical framework. A measuring instrument for topic specific knowledge for teaching chemical bonding was designed and validated using the Rasch measurement model. Quantitative and qualitative analysis of the teachers' responses to the instrument and a grounded analysis of story-line interview data from ten purposively selected teachers were used to identify the factors that played a role in the development of the teachers' knowledge. A further qualitative analysis of PCK episodes from the interview data revealed how the above factors influenced the teachers' knowledge. Findings revealed that teaching the same content multiple times and at multiple grade levels, embracing changes in the curriculum as opportunities for learning, and further studies at tertiary level, especially completing post-graduate studies in education, all played a role in the teachers' perceived shifts in their topic specific knowledge for teaching (TSKFT). Three learning trajectories were identified for the teachers in this study: teachers shifted towards deeper conceptual understanding of the content and used more sophisticated explanatory frameworks; teachers shifted towards more integrated topic specific knowledge for teaching; and teachers shifted from being text book bound and teacher-focussed towards becoming more student-focussed in their approach to teaching. The findings from this study provide guidelines for professional development programmes in terms of differentiated support to teachers according to their career stages and the inclusion of content specific training programmes which makes teaching for conceptual progression explicit. A further recommendation includes encouraging teachers to embark on post-graduate studies in education as this played a pivotal role in shifting teachers' topic specific knowledge for teaching chemical bonding.

A study has been carried out at the University of Edinburgh in order to examine how physics students’ abilities and attitudes towards study change during their time at university. This is a large topic with numerous possible avenues of research, as a result the field has been narrowed for this thesis in order to focus on three main subject areas; how students adapt during the transition from school to university, how students attitudes towards studying physics change during an undergraduate degree and, finally, student data handling skills in the undergraduate laboratory with links to whether student perceptions of their data handling skills are consistent with their ability. It has been found that students may face difficulties going from school to university study. Students potentially face gaps in their prior learning due to differences in school leaving qualification syllabi, which is compounded by instructors having expectations of student ability that are higher than student actual ability. It has been seen that students become less positive in their attitudes towards study over the course of their first year of instruction, potentially due to a drop in confidence. In the subject area of attitudes towards study, longitudinal studies have been carried out in order to examine the expert-like thinking of students. Results gathered are suggestive of a selection effect with the most expert-like thinkers possessing levels of expert thinking similar to those of physics instructors, even when initially entering the degree program. Investigation of student laboratory work has shown that there is a large gap between student estimations of their own ability and the reality of such skills. This has been demonstrated by contrasting the results of surveys examining student perceptions towards practical work with data gathered from a data handling diagnostic test that has been designed and implemented as part of this thesis.

Thesis (M.Phil.)--Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 71). Also available in electronic version.

<p> The Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) have established computational thinking as one of the science and engineering practices that should be developed in high school classrooms. Much of the work done by scientists is accomplished through the use of computation, but many students leave high school with little to no exposure to coding of any kind. This study outlines an attempt to integrate computational physics lessons into a high school algebra-based physics course which utilizes Modeling Instruction. Specifically, it aims to determine if students who complete computational physics assignments demonstrate any difference in understanding force concepts as measured by the Force Concept Inventory (FCI) versus students who do not. Additionally, it investigates students&rsquo; attitudes about learning computation alongside physics. Students were introduced to Vpython programs during the course of a semester. The FCI was administered pre and post instruction, and the gains were measured against a control group. The Computational Modeling in Physics Attitudinal Student Survey (COMPASS) was administered post instruction and the responses were analyzed. While the FCI gains were slightly larger on average than the control group, the difference was not statistically significant. This at least suggests that incorporating computational physics assignments does not adversely affect students&rsquo; conceptual learning.</p><p>

Physics is about sense-making. The world we live in and experience through our sensory modalities is highly complex. In order to make sense of this complexity we reduce the experiences to a more simplified form. The way in which this is achieved is through modelling. Physics consists of both theory and experiment, thus modelling in physics consists of two components: (1) conceptualization and mathematization (theory) which involves ontological innovation and introducing variables and (2) designing experiments which leads to measurements (experiment). We can then compare our theoretical predictions with our measurements. The present work is primarily focused on aspect (2) dealing with the modelling of experiment. First year physics courses include a teaching component directed at the key aspects that relate to experimentation. This includes the key concepts with regard to measurement and uncertainty. However, these have proved to be challenging aspects of a first-year curriculum and students often resort to rote methods. Student understanding of measurement and uncertainty was explored in detail in a series of studies that were carried by a collaboration between UCT and the University of York. This work showed that students exhibited a wide variety of ideas with regard to all aspects regarding data, ranging from data collection to data processing. Based on their theoretical constructs that explained this variation in terms of point and set paradigms, they concluded that the purpose of teaching was to move students from the point to the set paradigm. Despite the fact that they created an instrument (Physics Measurement Questionnaire (PMQ)) to measure such a shift, it is not clear that the measured shift reflects actual conceptual change. This is particularly so insofar as combining multiple readings into a single number such as the mean is concerned. While many of the questions on the PMQ do attempt to probe student thinking, the question regarding the mean is in fact purely calculational. Therefore, the nature of the responses does not allow one to fully determine to what extent the calculation follows from an appropriate model or whether it is simply an arithmetic step that is carried out without any model in mind. While calculating the mean might be regarded as a step forward for students who were previously classified as point thinkers it can be argued that this is in fact a retrograde step from a modelling perspective in that the step can be described as "model abandonment". Thus, rather than the mean being a stepping stone to further understanding of uncertainty, it could in fact prevent such a learning trajectory. As seen from the PMQ it is not easy to pose questions that probe what model, if any, students have in mind when calculating the mean. The present work thus aimed to explore the degree to which it was possible to identify to what extent students used the mean with some model in mind. The starting point for the work was the PMQ. Questions were posed in the same manner but with the aim of eliciting the reasons why students perceive the mean to be the appropriate way to proceed during data analysis. To what extent is it possible to probe students' modelling approaches in the first-year laboratory? Is it possible to design a non- interview methodology in order to identify their reasons for using the mean? To investigate this a number of questions were constructed and administered to two small groups of students, 20 and 30 respectively, as part of a two step iterative developmental research process. The questions were administered to first-year physics students at the University of Cape Town. The final questionnaire consisted of four questions. The two data collection probes were taken directly from the PMQ and placed at the beginning of the questionnaire for control purposes and the two pilot questions were adapted from the Using Repeated Distance (UR) Probe in the PMQ. UR was reformulated into two questions with an explanation component; one question investigated what students use as the final result in a purported experiment and the other looked at what they predicted as the next value. The analysis comprised careful investigation as to the "Level of Informativeness" provided by the questions followed by a cross probe analysis where the Level of Informativeness allowed for this to be done. The present studies that were carried out indicated that there was no straightforward way to elicit information as to whether the student had some model in mind or not. However, a number of insights into the way forward were gained. These included the way in which questions could be framed around the issues of the mean that allowed for some level of inference to be made. While some further work still remains insofar as this is concerned, we suggest that these questions be included in future versions of the PMQ.

"Context sensitivity" is a core issue in physics education research (PER). Why does student understanding of a concept depend so crucially on the context in which it is embedded? This dissertation attempts to answer this question by using a variety of theoretical tools to model understanding. We conducted three empirical studies which probed context sensitivity of student understanding of (i) Vector Addition; (ii) The FCI (Force Concept Inventory); and (iii) the learning of the concept of a Mathematical Group. (i) Regarding vector addition, we discovered context sensitivities involving the type of physical quantity added (e.g. force or momentum); the textual prompts "total", "net" and "resultant"; and the object on which a force acts. (ii) In the FCI, we discovered a moderate context sensitivity to unfamiliar words (i.e. when familiar words like "box" were substituted for unfamiliar words like "kist".) This sensitivity was moderately correlated with the difficulty of the question. (iii) Previous studies have shown that learners exhibit a sensitivity to the concreteness of the learning condition of a Mathematical Group; our study shows that students are engaged in different types of activity in these conditions. A variety of theoretical tools from PER, Cognitive Linguistics, Cognitive Psychology and other areas of Education Research are used to model student understanding in these various studies. Three key insights emerged. (a) The importance of one's model of "concept" - how it relates to the notion of "context", and how one chooses an appropriate grain size. (b) The difference between "expert" and "novice" - how this difference influences one's model of "concept", and how it influences one's notion of "sameness" and "difference". (c) Student reasoning - how a framing of a situation might result in fast, associative, linguistic reasoning on the one hand, or slow, deliberate simulative reasoning on the other. Finally, this thesis is grounded in Wittgensteinian ordinary language philosophy which maintains that notions of "concept", "context" and "understanding" obtain meaning not be referring to some transcendental "thing", but by being embedded in our messy form of life. In other words, by modelling understanding we are not approaching the "true meaning" of the term. Instead we are demonstrating how our various models are constitutive of what we mean when we say: "My students understand this concept".

Many studies have shown that students (at both school and university) have difficulties in understanding the concepts associated with DC circuits. Two competing theoretical frameworks have been advanced to explain these problems: "misconceptions" and "knowledge-in-pieces". The former is based on the assumption that student ideas are unitary, static and independent of context, while the latter considers student ideas to arise dynamically from flexible combinations of "pieces of knowledge" and that a particular combination of pieces is primed by the context presented. The present work explores the extent to which student responses change as a result of small, fine-grained changes to a simple open circuit with only three components: a battery, a single wire and a resistive element. Three different types of resistive element were used: a light bulb, a heater and a resistor. A previously piloted, eight-question written instrument, consisting of both forced choice responses and free response writing, was administered to two cohorts of non-major, first year physics students from different institutions. The results, consistent across both cohorts, confirmed that context (e.g., type of resistive element used) was critical in triggering student responses. Student reasoning varied widely, and the majority of students used more than one "foothold idea" on which to base their explanations. Only 10% of the combined cohort got all answers (canonically) correct, and all of these students used only the single idea of "loop continuity" as the basis of their explanations. Based on the written responses, and a small number of clarifying interviews, it was clear that sense-making was a key driver in student reasoning. However, either (a) an incorrect explanatory interpretation of a prior experience, or (b) the absence of any experiences from which to extract a key abstract concept, such as "loop continuity", lead to incorrect (canonical) answers. One implication of the findings is that, unlike mechanics, where prior concrete experience is used as the starting point and then refined toward abstract knowledge, it appears that starting with the abstract might be a more effective pedagogical approach. This stands in contrast to many curricula that start with a concrete instantiation such as the light bulb.

Includes bibliographical references. / For the public to be able to participate meaningfully in debates regarding issues that are related to science and technology it is important that they are properly informed and that their sources of information are reliable. One source of such information are university science students and it is therefore interesting to find out what their views are regarding various scientific concepts. For example such an area of interest is that of using nuclear power for electricity generation, in particular the dangers associated with radiation. A reasonably correct view of radiation would be seen as an important part of having a meaningful debate. The present study aims to find out the views that a group of university students who are studying physics hold about radiation, in particular their immediate response to being asked to clarify what the term radiation means. However, the notion that students simply have conceptions that are unitary and static has been challenged by several Physics Education Researchers. Instead a view summarised as “knowledge in pieces” has been proposed in which it is suggested that much smaller units of ideas are brought together dynamically depending on the situation at hand and that context plays an important role in how students respond to questions. Thus, the thesis explores to what extent context plays a role in their responses by preceding the question with four different scenarios which are suggested as the contexts in which the question is being asked. In summary, the guiding questions for the present work are: (1) What do students understand by the term radiation and (2) To what extent do student response patterns depend on “textual priming”. The thesis is divided into two parts (1) a pilot study in which the methodology is established and (2) a follow up study (main study) in which the effect of textual priming on the responses is explored.

The laboratory environment can prove to be a complex space, with its potential to foster scientific sense making abilities in students. One cause for concern is the frequent physics tearoom discourse that students do not like physics laboratories. However, before attempting to address this issue, it is necessary to establish to what extent it is true and then to probe the issues that might underlie such perceptions. The present study, part of a larger program that is aimed at probing student views with regard to the lab experience, describes (a) the development of an instrument that probes students' perceptions of lab engagement and (b) the results of a selected subset of the data as detailed below. A written instrument, the Physics Perceptions Lab Questionnaire (PPLQ), was designed to probe the following five areas: expectations of labwork, enjoyment of labs, the perceived degree of personal learning that took place, the perceived association between lectures and lab activities, and views about the relationship between experiment and theory. Each of the five questions that made up the PPLQ was constructed in the form of a debate in which different views were declared. Thus, the data that ensued were of two types: (1) a Forced Choice Response (FCR), and (2) a Free Writing Response (FWR). The FCR data were analyzed by tallying the various choices made for each question, while the FWR data were analyzed using a grounded approach. The PPLQ was administered to 100 first year physics students at the University of Cape Town, after they had completed four weeks of the lab course. The focus of the present work is on the results obtained for the (a) Enjoyment and (b) Learning probes, and thus the analysis and results of the FWR data are limited to these two questions. The FCR results of the two probes on which the present study is focused (Enjoyment and Learning) indicated two opposing trends. While the majority of respondents felt that they had indeed learnt a great deal from the labs, this largely positive outcome for learning did not translate into a positive perception of enjoyment of labs. In contrast, the majority of the respondents indicated that they had not enjoyed the labs. The grounded analysis of the accompanying FWRs led to the emergence of 15 reasoning categories. The categories are grouped according to their nature of being intrinsic and extrinsic to the laboratory task and also translate to being internal and external to the students' locus of control. In addition, each individual reason that was provided indicated a Positive (P) or Negative (N) Impact on engagement. The data were thus also coded for P or N impact. To improve the quality of engagement would thus require a collective effort that takes into consideration the link between cognition and emotions along with framing, as they encompass together the issues intrinsic and extrinsic to the lab task.