Prospective Teachers’ Representations on the Concept of Force

Abstract

We present a study on teacher education and, in particular, on Physics. Our assumption is that General Didactics and Disciplinary Didactic constitute two fundamental components of teachers’ professional development and therefore both must be used to interpret didactic phenomena adequately. This research involves a sample of 274 prospective teachers, enrolled in the Primary Education Sciences degrees in three Italian Universities (Milano Bicocca, Udine, Urbino,). It concerns the study of the spontaneous representations produced by students to foster understanding of the force concept and on the reasons given to motivate their effectiveness on an educational level and disciplinary one. The research tools and methods were developed by crossing the literature of General Didactics and Physics Education, identifying analytical categories that emerge from two different and complementary perspectives. In the broad spectrum of students’ conceptions, given by this double perspective, some aspects stand out: most of the representations do not include the representation of the forces at play, but rather imply a precise didactic approach inherent to the concept of force. This is confirmed by the analysis of the didactic and disciplinary motivations, in which a frequent identification of the two types of motivations emerges.

Concept of Force Representations of Prospective Primary Teachers

“…The analysis of PPT's representations were performed on the basis of different grids (Appendix A and C) [18]. These grids were integrated in an electronic sheet, reproduced only in a little part in figure 1.…”

“…Teacher play the crucial role to help students to read and produce images building correct conceptual models. This basis was the reference for the examination of PPTs' drawings and associated description and motivations [18].…”

“…Visual language structures are similar to those of verbal language and the typical representations are conceptual models [3,[12][13][14][15][16]. It is crucial, therefore, to study how the future teachers represent the concept of force [3,18] and how these representations change after a formative module, with respect to the conception of force, to the representation as didactic instrument, to the specific representation in physics. In the framework of the Model of Educational Reconstruction (MER) [19] we develop research on the conceptual analysis of the idea of force based on the representation involving that concept of Prospective Primary Teachers (PPT) of three Italian university (Milan, Pesaro-Urbino, Udine), before the physics module.…”

Pre-Service Teacher Educators Assessment of Adequacy of Google Classroom Application as Teaching Tools in Teacher Education Programme Nigeria

“…According to Martini, teaching in teacher education is of two types: the didactic mode and the evocative mode. Didactic teaching implies passing on traditional knowledge or teaching how to do something (Martini et al 2021). Teachers use the lecture to inculcate knowledge or demonstration to model actions, after which students demonstrate they have learned what was taught either by reciting or writing the material or by repeating the demonstration.…”