Developing and evaluating a paper-and-pencil test to assess components of physics teachers’ pedagogical content knowledge

ABSTRACT

Teachers’ professional knowledge is assumed to be a key variable for effective teaching. As teacher education has the goal to enhance professional knowledge of current and future teachers, this knowledge should be described and assessed. Nevertheless, only a limited number of studies quantitatively measures physics teachers’ professional knowledge. The study reported in this paper was part of a bigger project with the broader goal of understanding teacher professional knowledge. We designed a test instrument to assess the professional knowledge of physics teachers (N = 186) in the dimensions of content knowledge (CK), pedagogical content knowledge (PCK), and pedagogical knowledge (PK). A model describing the relationships between these three dimensions of professional knowledge was created to inform the design of the tests used to measure CK, PCK, and PK. In this paper, we describe the model with particular emphasis on the PCK part, and the subsequent PCK test development and its implementation in detail. We report different approaches to evaluate the PCK test, including the description of content validity, the examination of the internal structure of professional knowledge, and the analysis of construct validity by testing teachers across different school subjects, teachers from different school types, pre-service teachers, and physicists. Our findings demonstrate that our PCK test results could distinguish physics teachers from the other groups tested. The PCK test results could not be explained by teachers’ CK or PK, cognitive abilities, computational skills, or science knowledge.

KEYWORDS:

• Pedagogical content knowledge
• physics education
• teacher knowledge
• quantitative research

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Sophie Kirschner is a postdoctoral researcher at the Justus Liebig University Giessen. Her main interest is teacher knowledge and learning with a particular focus on physics teachers. She received her diploma in physics in 2009 at the Goethe University Frankfurt. In 2013 she earned her Ph.D. at the University of Duisburg-Essen with the dissertation Modeling and Analysing Physics Teachers’ Professional Knowledge.

Andreas Borowski is professor for physics education at the University of Potsdam, Germany. His research interests are the professional knowledge of (pre-service) teachers and the competence of physics students at upper secondary and university.

Hans Ernst Fischer is Senior-Professor for physics education at the Faculty of Physics at the University of Duisburg-Essen. His main research focus is on teaching and learning physics from primary to university level and professional knowledge and professional development of pre- and in-service teachers.

Julie Gess-Newsome is the Interim Academic Dean at Oregon State University-Cascades in Bend, Oregon, USA. Her research interests include teacher professional knowledge involving pedagogical content knowledge.

Claudia von Aufschnaiter received her PhD in physics education in 1999. She has been working as a full professor of physics education at the University of Giessen since 2007. In her research, she investigates how students develop physics concepts, argue about physics, and experience working on physics tasks. Likewise, she investigates how (pre-service) teachers develop “educational concepts” about assessment of student thinking and learning.

Notes

1. All physics educators own a PhD in physics education, three of whom were professors for physics education at the time, now all of them are.

2. As teacher education in Germany differs between federal states and changes frequently, the number and quality of physics courses, physics education courses, and pedagogy courses all vary. This variation is making the characterization of the teachers recruited into our study imprecise. We, therefore, only distinguish between basic education physics teachers (BE) who only teach lower secondary, and higher education physics teachers (HE) allowed to teach lower and upper secondary. All pre-service teachers complete a practical pedagogical training after their university degree studies.

3. Unfortunately, Facets does not allow a principal component analysis of residuals for further analysis of the dimensionality.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung.