A Case Study On The Pedagogical Content Knowledge Of High School Physics Teachers

In order to achieve the curriculum goals established by the high school physicalcurriculum standard, physics teachers need to select the teaching contents associated withstudents’ life and modern social and technological development, set clear teaching objectives,understand the characteristics of physics’ knowledge connotation, structure and relationshipson the basis of the students’ prior knowledge and experience. They present the physicalknowledge effectively in order to allow students to take the initiative to get the basicknowledge and basic skills through scientific inquiry and teaching activities, cultivating thehigh school students’ scientific ability, forming their spirit of scientific inquiry, realistic andscientific attitudes and their innovative scientific spirit of exploration. Pedagogical ContentKnowledge stems from the teachers’ personal practical experience and directly controlsteachers’ classroom decision-making, which related to the teaching subjects contentknowledge. The reasearch on the teachers’ PCK has been a hot issuue recently. According toWang Jie&Gu Lianchen (2007), we need to force on "what do teachers actually know?"“What make teachers obtain the ability to teaching?”,” how do teachers transfer theirknowledge?” rather than "what teachers should know?","what capacity should teachers have?". That is, we need to discuss some "real" questions rather than “ought to be” questions.This study forces on the high school physics teachers’ pedagogical content knowledge. Itmainly adopts "multiple cases" of qualitative research methods to investigate theunderstanding of four Hainanese physics teacher about some physical topics. There are4specific dimensions to explore the differences between novice physics teachers’ PCK andexperienced physics teachers’ PCK: understanding in teaching objectives; understanding inteaching strategies; understanding in evaluation, understanding in students’ learning physicsdifficulties. In addition, the study also proposes some suggestions to promote the developmentof physics teachers’ PCK.Findings in this research lead to the conclusion: there are some differences betweennovice teachers’ PCK and experienced teachers’ PCK. And these differences are mainly reflected in the following five aspects: the differences in the physics teaching goal setting;differences in the understanding of students’ learning difficulties; differences in choosingteaching strategies; differences in the understanding of classroom teaching evaluation;differences in the physical sciences content selection.For example, novice teachers are lack ofpedagogical knowledge which is in accordance with the characteristics of physics knowledgesystem, embodied in:(1) emphasize the basic knowledge and skills, be lack of consciousnessand means which can make students do practical activities;(2) cannot predict the wrongconcept s;(3) the teaching strategies is also unitary, tending to adopt to explain the teachingmaterials;(4) focus on classroom assessment, emphasizing that the students solve in the inaccordance with the procedure;(5) some knowledge of physics is one-sided.We can develop teachers’ PCK in the following ways:(1) to enhance the pedagogicalcontent knowledge of the novice teachers based on the” observation-discussion-practicalreflection” learning mode;(2) to strengthen the case study of teachers’ pedagogical contentknowledge;(3) teacher training should be practical;(4) to provide a cooperative environmentfor the development of PCK in high school physic teachers.