Didactical Reconstructions in Knowledge Organization and Consolidation in Physics Teacher Education

Abstract

Physics teachers have an essential role in forming the attitudes and conceptions of future citizens towards science and technology, as well as in educating the future generations of scientists. Therefore, the physics teacher education must guarantee the best available education to pre-service physics teachers; sound knowledge of physics should be combined with a good understanding of the didactical and pedagogical aspects of teaching and learning. The situation is often that after university physics courses, the pre-service physics teachers’ knowledge is still quite fragmented and incoherent. They also often lack the concept formation perspective to physics knowledge. I discuss here a research-based instructional approach that is developed for pre-service physics teachers for consolidating and organizing their subject matter content knowledge. In the core of the approach, graphical tools are called as didactical reconstructions of processes (DRoP) and structure (DRoS). The idea behind the reconstructions is that “new” physics knowledge is always constructed on the basis of previous knowledge. This leads to a network of quantities and laws, where the experiments and models construct the connections between the physics concepts. Finally, I discuss the implementation of didactical reconstructions in instruction and show that the didactical reconstructions help students to organize and consolidate their knowledge.