A Survey on Content Knowledge in Physics for Pre-service Teachers in Japan Using Science Problems of TIMSS 2015

Content knowledge is one of the important bases for teachers to acquire and improve their teaching skills. In Japan, although many pre-service teachers not majoring science are not confident to teach science, especially physics, because of a lack of content knowledge and experimental experience, there are few investigations to reveal their weak points specifically. In this study, we conducted a survey for undergraduates of a teacher training college in Japan to evaluate their content knowledge using science problems for 8th graders of TIMSS 2015. The results of the survey showed a positive correlation between the undergraduates and Japanese junior high school 2nd graders (8th graders) who participated in TIMSS 2015 in terms of the correct answer rate for each question. The undergraduates generally showed higher scores than the junior high school students, especially for some problems related to familiar phenomena in daily life, whereas some common weaknesses were found between them. Significant differences in the average percentage of correct answers were detected between students who studied “Advanced Physics” in high school, those who studied only “Basic Physics” and those who did not study physics at all. The experience of learning physics in high school may have influenced the pre-service teachers’ understanding of physics contents. The analysis of undergraduates’ wrong answers revealed a tendency of their mistakes. Even for questions about similar phenomena, the scores can depend on the question format. They tended to be good at problems given schematic diagrams with options, but poor at problems in which they are required to answer reasons with sentences. Further investigations on physics content knowledge for pre-service teachers can be useful not only for understanding their misconceptions more specifically but also for improving future physics education and teacher trainings more effectively based on their weaknesses.