This study examines the relationship between teacher knowledge and student learning for 9,556 students of 181 middle school physical science teachers. Assessment instruments based on the National Science Education Standards with 20 items in common were administered several times during the school year to both students and their teachers. For items that had a very popular wrong answer, the teachers who could identify this misconception had larger classroom gains, much larger than if the teachers knew only the correct answer. On items on which students did not exhibit misconceptions, teacher subject matter knowledge alone accounted for higher student gains. This finding suggests that a teacher’s ability to identify students’ most common wrong answer on multiple-choice items, a form of pedagogical content knowledge, is an additional measure of science teacher competence.

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We report on the development of an item test bank and associated instruments based on those K-12 national standards which involve astronomy and space science. Utilizing hundreds of studies in the science education research literature on student misconceptions, we have constructed 211 unique items that measure the degree to which students abandon such ideas for accepted scientific views. Piloted nationally with 7599 students and their 88 teachers spanning grades 5-12, the items reveal a range of interesting results, particularly student difficulties in mastering the NRC Standards and AAAS Benchmarks. Teachers generally perform well on items covering the standards of the grade level at which they teach, exhibiting few misconceptions of their own. Teachers dramatically overestimate their students' performance, perhaps because they are unaware of their students' misconceptions. Examples are given showing how the developed instruments can be used to assess the effectiveness of instruction and to evaluate the impact of professional development activities for teachers.

We present an analysis of the relationship between student and teacher mastery of National Research Council's K8 life sciences content standards.

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