How to help students learn: an investigation of how in- and pre-service physics teachers respond to students’ explanations

Dodlek, Danijela (author), Planinšič, Gorazd (author), Etkina, Eugenia (author)

Research carried out through the last 20 years gave us undeniable evidence that to learn anything we need to be active participants, not passive observers. One of the important aspects of learning physics is constructing explanations of physical phenomena. To support and guide students toward constructing their explanations, teachers need to be attentive and responsive to students’ explanations. To learn how physics teachers interpret and respond to students’ explanations we investigated pre- and in-service physics teachers’ responses to students’ written explanations of their answers to a complex physics problem. The survey administered to the participants included the problem statement and four authentic student explanations. The participants were asked to identify each student’s strengths and weaknesses and to provide a response to that student. We found that while the participants were successful in identifying productive and problematic aspects of student reasoning, they rarely built on student reasoning when responding to the students, mostly focusing on addressing problematic aspects. The paper discusses why this finding is important for physics teacher preparation programs and professional development programs.

• Language: English
• Keywords: physics education
• Work type: Article
• Typology: 1.01 - Original Scientific Article
• Organization: FMF - Faculty of Mathematics and Physics
• Publication version: Version of Record
• Publication date: 05.04.2024
• Year: 2024
• Number of pages: Str. 010120-1-010120-31
• Numbering: Vol. 20, iss. 1
• PID: 20.500.12556/RUL-155615
• UDC: 37.091.3:53
• ISSN on article: 2469-9896
• DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevPhysEducRes.20.010120
• COBISS.SI-ID: 191755267
• Publication date in RUL: 08.04.2024

Record is a part of a journal

• Title: Physical review : Physics education research
• Shortened title: Phys. rev. Phys. educ. res.
• Publisher: American Physical Society
• ISSN: 2469-9896
• COBISS.SI-ID: 525668121

Licences

• License: CC BY 4.0, Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
• Link: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Description: This is the standard Creative Commons license that gives others maximum freedom to do what they want with the work as long as they credit the author.

Secondary language

• Language: Slovenian
• Keywords: poučevanje fizike

Projects

• Funder: ARIS - Slovenian Research and Innovation Agency
• Project number: P1-0060-2019
• Name: Eksperimentalna biofizika kompleksnih sistemov in slikanje v biomedicini