The Development of important Content Knowledge for Explaining Physics

by Prof. Andreas Borowski (University of Potsdam), Mr Patrick Enkrott (U Potsdam)

Thursday 14 Feb 2019, 16:00 → 17:00 Europe/Zurich

31/3-004 - IT Amphitheatre (CERN)

Teaching physics is a challenging task that requires a profound education. Part of this education is to provide students with good explanations for physics phenomena and thereby help them to understand the core ideas of physics. Just stressing out that content knowledge (CK) is of vital importance for teaching in general is not precise enough. We need to take a closer look at what kind of CK is most vital for the daily business of physics teachers (such as explaining physics) and track its development over the course of university education. In our project, we describe the knowledge learned at university as university knowledge (UK) and the knowledge taught at school as school knowledge (SK). However, we assume there is another aspect of CK that allows teachers to find suitable solving approaches to physics problems, which helps them to identify similarities in physics ideas and to handle model limitations. We call this aspect of CK deeper school knowledge (DSK) and expect this aspect to be of special importance for a good explanation in physics. The talk discusses the various aspects of CK from the point of view of development within university education. In addition, the importance of the different aspects of CK for explaining physical phenomena will be discussed.