How Do Physics Teacher Candidates Substantiate Their Knowledge? An Analytical Framework for Examining the Epistemic Dimensions of Content Knowledge in Higher Education

Abstract

Supporting teacher candidates’ learning of coherent and well-ordered content knowledge is one of the most important educational aims in subject teacher education. To reach this aim, teacher educators need suitable tools to enhance the formation of such knowledge. In this article, we present an analytical framework to examine conceptual knowledge, meaning the ability to define the relevant concepts pertaining to a task; relational knowledge, i.e., the ability to consider interrelations between the concepts; and strategic knowledge, i.e., the ability to use the knowledge by providing (experimental or modeling) procedures, which build new knowledge. A sample analysis of 16 teacher candidates’ written reports is presented to illustrate how this framework can be used. The aim of the study was to reveal what kind of variation in teacher candidates’ content knowledge can be found. This study suggests that teacher candidates’ written reports can reveal remarkable differences in the epistemic dimensions of content knowledge. The framework shows the differences among the teacher candidates as well as produces information for teacher educators of the critical aspects, when and where to intervene, and where to focus using different teaching practices.

Metacognitive awareness in relation to university students’ learning profiles

“…Knowledge about cognition includes declarative, procedural and conditional knowledge of cognition (Sperling et al, 2002). Declarative knowledge refers to "knowing about things", procedural knowledge to "knowing how to do things" and conditional knowledge to "knowing why and when to do things" (De Jong & Ferguson-Hessler, 2010;Schraw & Moshman, 1995;Nousiainen et al, 2019). Declarative knowledge can be characterized as knowledge about the contents of learning and especially the strategies that can be applied to increase the performance of task completion (Harrison & Vallin, 2018;Schraw & Moshman, 1995).…”

Physics knowledge justification: an analysis framework to examine physics content knowledge

“…Physics content knowledge to be learned includes a collection of physics concepts (quantities), laws, general principles, models and experiments. It is of importance to understand how these different pieces are connected to each other and how they can be substantiated (see Nousiainen et al, 2019). Experiments and models create new relational connections between concepts.…”

“…Therefore, in what follows, we focus our epistemic analysis into concepts, relations and models and experiments. Physics content knowledge can be approached by dividing it into three subcategories (for more details, see Nousiainen et al, 2019): 1. Conceptual knowledge (C) refers to the ability to identify and define relevant physics concepts and to reflect on their applicability.…”