TEACHER TRAINING STUDENTS’ ATTAINMENT OF SOME
CONCEPTS IN A TEACHING PERSPECTIVE
Karin Petersson
Department of Social and Welfare Studies, Linköping University
e.mail: karpe@isv.liu.se
Supervisor: Helge Strömdahl
THERMAL
The aim of this study is to investigate teacher training students’ attainment of
the thermal concepts heat and temperature. More specifically this investigation is
aimed to answer the question: in what way do teacher training students change
their notions of heat, cold and temperature during one of their teacher-training
practice courses?
During the teacher training program the teacher training students are going to
shift from a learning perspective to a teaching perspective (Frederik et al.,
1999). The students need knowledge of both disciplinary and pedagogical
character and they also need to be able to implement that knowledge in a
teaching situation.
Teacher training students (n=58) in their second semester of science studies
performed a task dealing with heat, cold and temperature during a two weeks
long teacher-training practice course. Before the teacher-training practice course
started the students took a pre-test and when they came back to the university
they took a post-test. During the time between the two tests, no teaching was
offered from the university.
The pre- and post-test consisted of one quantitative (Yeo & Zadnick, 2001) and
one qualitative part. The quantitative part was analysed statistically while the
triadic approach (Strömdahl, in prep.) served as an analysing tool for the
qualitative part.
Preliminary results show that teacher training students hold expected notions of
the thermal concepts at the pre-test but they change their explanation of heat,
cold and temperature after participating in a two week long teacher training
practice course dealing with these concepts.
References
Frederik, I., Van Der Valk, T., Leite, L., & Thorén, I. (1999). Pre-service physics
theachers and conceptual difficulties on temperature and heat. European Journal
of Teacher Education, 22(1), 61-74.
Strömdahl, H. (in preparation). The educational challenge of polysemy – a triadic
approach to interpret signifiers in science.
Yeo, S., & Zadnick, M. (2001). Introductury thermal concepts evaluation:
assessing students’ understanding. The Physics Teacher, 39, 496-504.