A Study On The Understanding Of Mechanics Concepts Among Pre-service Physics Teachers From The Perspective Of Educational Neuroscience

With the deepening of the reform of the basic education curriculum in China,higher requirements have been put on the professionalism of teachers.As reserve teachers,pre-service teachers have gradually become the trend of educational research.As the basis for the professional development of teachers,the subject's professional knowledge possessed by teachers has greatly affected the quality of teachers' teaching.In the physics discipline,mechanics is the foundation,and the concept of mechanics is the prerequisite for learning physics and physics teaching.Therefore,accurately assessing the pre-service teachers' understanding of the mechanics concept is also very helpful to improve the quality of pre-service teachers' education.In the past related research,the commonly used research methods were limited to the statistical analysis of the test data and the problem-solving interviews.These methods rely more on students' self-reports and lack more direct evidence.In the new era of rapid development of science and technology,educational neuroscience,as a new interdisciplinary discipline,reveals certain laws of cognitive learning from the perspective of scientific empirical research.The development of educational neuroscience has had a profound impact on the development of sub-disciplines such as educational technology,educational psychology,and science education.Among them,research methods such as functional magnetic resonance imaging,eye-tracking technology,and electroencephalogram technology have gradually combined with educational research methods,promoting the development of the education field and providing scientific basis for practical teaching and curriculum reform.However,there are few related studies in specific disciplines.This article aims to try to integrate the research methods of educational neuroscience into specific disciplines,and use the technical means of educational neuroscience to obtain the most direct evidence and provide a new data source for educational researchers to verify and evaluate problems.In this study,W Normal University was used as an example,and a questionnaire survey was conducted on the concept understanding of 212 freshmen normal students majoring in physics using the Force Concept Inventory(FCI)as a survey tool.Firstly,analyzing the test data of physics pre-service teachers from the overall and different subject concepts;Secondly,using the research methods of educational neuroscience in the subject area and eye tracking technology to monitor the pre-service teachers' attention to solve conceptual problems.Based on the data of the attention distribution of the problem options,analyzing the influence of different understanding levels of mechanical concepts on cognitive patterns in the process of solving conceptual problems;Finally,EEG equipment was used to monitor pre-service teachers' event-related potentials(ERPs)for exploring the similarities and differences of the activation degree of cognitive mechanism in the brain between pre-service teachers with different levels of understanding of mechanics concepts.The results show that the vast majority of pre-service physics teachers have achieved excellent results in FCI test,and a few pre-service teachers still have misconceptions of some basic mechanics;Eye tracking results show that the FCI test is a fast decision-making process.A further analysis of eye movement data found that although a large number of pre-service teachers have met FCI test requirements,they still pay attention to misconceptions;According to the analysis results of ERPs,since pre-service teachers who have a better understanding of mechanical concepts have a deeper understanding of concept pairs when they recognize word pairs,they need more resources for semantic integration.Therefore,their response time is longer,and the activation effect produced by the brain region is stronger,which is reflected in the larger amplitude of the N400 component,and the corresponding brain region potential is more negative.By discussing the research results,the existing problems in basic mechanics concepts of pre-physics teachers are analyzed.At the same time,the cognitive mechanism of pre-service teachers with different levels of understanding in mechanics concepts is explored from a scientific perspective by interpreting eye movement information and EEG signals.Through the analysis and discussion of this study,the feasibility of integrating the research methods of educational neuroscience into the evaluation of scientific education is illustrated.