Teachers’ professional vision in teaching physics – a validation study

ABSTRACT

For the promotion of students’ learning in science, teachers must attend to critical classroom situations in which students express their ideas about scientific concepts and methods. The notion of professional vision is used to describe the skill of noticing situations that are relevant for learning and understanding. The present study contributes to solving the problem of whether professional vision with a physics-specific focus can be validly measured through the application of an instrument based on scripted instructional videos and a partially closed questionnaire. In three sub-studies, video vignettes, and items were developed, resulting in an instrument consisting of 19 items (EAP reliability was 0.698) through which physics-specific professional vision could be measured. Further analysis supported the construct validity of the instrument. It has been shown that physics-specific professional vision differed significantly according to the subject studied by pre-service teachers (i.e. physics and geography), indicating a physics specificity of the construct.

KEYWORDS:

• Professional development
• pedagogical content knowledge
• physics education
• professional vision

Acknowledgement

The authors would like to thank the editors and two anonymous reviewers for their very helpful feedback. Special thanks to Knut Schwippert and Johanna Ratzek for his and her helpful advices and comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 On how to sequence instruction and learning to understand the concept of energy, see, for example, Duit and Neumann (2014). For a constructivist model of lesson planning, see Widodo and Duit (2005).

2 This dimension has been called ‘selective attention’ by others (see Seidel & Stürmer, 2014; Sherin, 2001).

3 This dimension has also been referred to as ‘knowledge-based reasoning’ (see Seidel & Stürmer, 2014; Sherin, 2001).

4 This akronym in German means ‘Professionelle Unterrichtswahrnehmung angehender Physiklehrkräfte’. This translates to ‘professional vision of pre-service physics teachers’.

5 Scholten et al. (2019) have reported in more detail how the extent to which teachers perceive the intended critical situations has been assessed.

6 Videos were randomly assigned to test persons. Finally, all three videos were presented an equal number of times.

7 The interrater reliability was given by Gramzow (2015) with values between .25 to .79. (p. 152). Our coding resulted in an overall Kappa score of 0.79 across all tasks used for this study.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung (Federal Ministry of Education and Research): [Grant Number 01JA1511].