How Do Teachers Interpret and Respond to Students’ Explanations?

We present the findings of the study of in-service and pre-service teachers’ ability to interpret student explanations and respond to them productively. We used the Tasks of Teaching from the content knowledge for teaching energy (CKT-E) framework to analyse the participants’ responses to a survey that asked them to comment on students’ explanations for a non-traditional problem involving momentum and energy. The survey contained the text of the problem and four different students’ explanations of their answer choice. The participants were asked to comment on the student’s strengths/weaknesses, and describe how they would respond to the student.