Since the use of digital media opens new possibilities in physics education, pre-service teachers should develop pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) regarding digital media during teacher education. In the joint project DiKoLeP (German for: digital competencies of pre-service teachers in physics) of RWTH Aachen University, the University of Graz and the University of Tübingen, we therefore developed and implemented a university teaching concept with certain core elements to foster this digital-media PCK of pre-service physics teachers. The teaching concept was implemented as a university seminar at the three universities, considering the common core elements as well as individual curricular requirements. We evaluated the teaching concept in a pre-post-design with a recently developed knowledge test to measure digital-media PCK. Our findings indicated that the developed knowledge test is suitable to validly measure the digital-media PCK of pre-service physics teachers. Furthermore, first results of the empirical evaluation at the three participating universities showed a significant increase in students’ digital-media PCK with a small-to-medium effect for students who attended the theoretical as well as the practical sessions of the seminar.
Introductory electricity is a difficult topic for most lower secondary students, especially the development of an adequate conceptualisation of voltage is seen as a major obstacle. A few instructional concepts concerning the teaching and learning of physics have been proven helpful when it comes to constructing conceptual knowledge. For example, the choice of content structure, meaningful elementarisation of basic concepts or adequate use of analogies. What has not been in the focus is how physics school textbooks consider these factors. In this article, we compare four widely used Austrian physics school textbooks concerning their content structure, definition of basic concepts and their use of analogies. Results show that the concept of ‘content structure diagrams’ is a useful tool to analyse schoolbooks. Although Austria has a compulsory syllabus, the four schoolbooks greatly differ in the amount of covered content and interlinking of concepts. However, a few common approaches regarding the sequencing of the concepts were identified and are reported in this article.
ZusammenfassungDer aktuelle Klimawandel stellt unsere Gesellschaft, besonders zukünftige Generationen, vor große Herausforderungen. Ein grundlegendes Verständnis des Klimawandels kann nicht nur Jugendlichen dabei helfen, falsche oder widersprüchliche Darstellungen besser einzuschätzen, um so am gesellschaftlichen Diskurs zum Thema Klimawandel teilhaben zu können. Um Aussagen über das Verständnis von zentralen fachlichen Inhalten zum Klimawandel zuverlässig treffen zu können, braucht es geeignete Testinstrumente. Für die Entwicklung eines Concept Inventories zu den naturwissenschaftlichen Grundlagen des Klimawandels (den wir CCCI-422 nennen) wurden zentrale fachliche Inhalte identifiziert, offene Aufgaben entwickelt und schließlich Distraktoren und Attraktoren aus insgesamt über 50 Interviews abgeleitet. Anschließend wurde der Concept Inventory in mehreren Pilotierungs- und Validierungsstudien eingesetzt, um so unterschiedliche Argumente, die für den Einsatz des CCCI-422 sprechen, zu sammeln. Es wurde etwa eine Teilstudie durchgeführt, um ein Argument für die externe Validität der Testwertinterpretation zu formulieren. Dabei zeigten sich theoretisch angenommene Unterschiede auch in den Personenfähigkeiten. In zwei weiteren Teilstudien konnten zusätzlich Argumente für die Instruktionssensitivität des Concept Inventories formuliert werden. Als Argument für die Konstruktvalidität lässt sich zudem auf Basis von Dimensionsanalysen eine eindimensionale sowie fünfdimensionale Struktur ableiten. Diese fünf Dimensionen entsprechen den fünf theoretisch abgeleiteten Inhaltsbereichen, wobei tendenziell Unterschied Wetter – Klima der leichteste und Atmosphäre unserer Erde der schwerste Inhaltsbereich sind. Wir plädieren daher dafür, dass der CCCI-422 abhängig vom Einsatzzweck als eindimensionaler oder fünfdimensionaler Concept Inventory genutzt werden kann. In diesem Beitrag wird der entwickelte Concept Inventory inklusive seinem Entstehungsprozess vorgestellt, der als Onlinematerial zur Nutzung zur Verfügung gestellt wird.
Statistical ideas play a vital role in scientific investigations. For students enrolling in physics-related courses at university, the need to interpret data is set from the start. Analysing graphical representations of data is seen as one way to acquaint students with statistical thinking without relying on pre-knowledge about formal statistics for applying more sophisticated methods like multiple regression. We designed a learning environment, which supports students in understanding the exploratory analysis of multivariate datasets as well as the concept of multiple regression. For phase one of the learning path, we work with exploratory data analysis using the software TinkerPlots, which has several major advantages in contrast to conventional software. Only in phase two formal inferential statistics is applied. We have chosen a context-oriented approach for this learning environment, using the particulate matter concentration in an Austrian city as topic. By providing data from online data repositories in a simplified way, students get the opportunity to work with real data. The amount of this data exceeds the number of measurements collected in typical training labs in an authentic and feasible way. In this article, the design of the intervention and a range of results originating from the triggered learning paths will be presented and discussed. To sum it up, we illustrate advantages and opportunities of the use of innovative software, online data repositories and informal statistics for a first introduction of methods of formal statistics like multiple regression.
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