On PCK Of Student-teachers Major In Physics

PCK, the abbreviation of Pedagogical Content Knowledge, is a teacher’s understanding of how to help students understand specific subject matter. Basing on the PCK model of Grossman and Magnusson, we built a PCK model including knowledge of curricula, knowledge of students’understanding of science, knowledge of instructional strategies and knowledge of assessment.Non-probability sampling is used to choose34senior student-teachers major in physics who came from6universities throughout China including East China Normal University, Shanghai Normal University, Wenzhou University, South China Normal University, Hunan Normal University and Henan Normal University. The specific thesis, Newton’s Second Law, choosen from the forth chapter fourth section of high school physics (compulsory1) published by People’s Education Press, is selected as an example. The lesson preparation method mainly for the study of pre-service teachers developed by foreign scholars, Van Der Valk and so on, is used to research each content and specific source of PCK of the participators. The conclusions are showed as follows:(1) Knowledge of Curricula:Student-teachers’basic knowledge which is mainly from middle school physics is roughly good overall, however, their deep knowledge which is mainly from university fundamental physics and middle school physics teaching theory is bad. Specificlly speaking, their understanding and thinking is not enough.(2) Knowledge of Students’Understanding of Science:Many Student-teachers’ analyses of students’ knowledge foudation directly based on the textbooks. They always pay more attention to the learned knowledge, but they don’t consider the unknown knowledge too much. For less contact with middle school students, many participators’analyses of students’difficulties and possible misunderstandings are a little one-sided, mainly based on the speculation of the learning experiences in their own middle school physics.(3) Knowledge of Instructional Strategies:Through the study of middle school physics teaching theory, many student-teachers roughly know the overall design of the teaching process, but always couldn’t be well associated with specific points in middle school physics. Their statements of the specific teaching steps sometimes relied too much on the textbooks, for they are not familiar with the difficulties which are not given explicitly in them.(4) Knowledge of Assessment:Influenced by their own learning experience and the exam-oriented education, many student-teachers always emphasized too much on the evaluation of knowledge and skills dimensions. Although they have touched the diversity of evaluation methods through physics teaching theory, they also tend to use traditional evaluation methods.Overall, the student-teachers major in physics who participated in this study did better in the theoretical basis of PCK. On the contrary, many of them did worse in the practical PCK connected closely to middle school for the lack of practical experience.According to the above conclusions, five proposals are proposed for the optimization of the PCK of student-teachers major in physics of normal universities:(1) Increase the correlation between the university fundamental physics and middle school physics points;(2) Enhance the practicality of the physics teaching theory to middle school physics teaching;(3) Extend the time of educational practice and probation, as well as improve the effectiveness of them;(4) Organize more micro-teaching practice, teaching skills competition and other related activities.