Exploring pedagogical content knowledge of physics teaching assistants using the Energy and Momentum Conceptual Survey

This study examines the extent to which physics graduate teaching assistants (TAs) are aware of introductory physics student thinking and the types of challenges introductory students commonly have with energy and momentum concepts, which is important for implementing active learning methodologies and supporting diverse learners in physics courses. We present findings from a TA professional development course and discuss an approach to investigate TAs’ pedagogical content knowledge, specifically their ability to recognize introductory student conceptual difficulties. We investigated 70 first-year graduate TAs’ ability to identify common introductory physics student alternate conceptions on the Energy and Momentum Conceptual Survey (EMCS). The TAs participated in a professional development course that emphasized reflection on introductory student thinking patterns to promote evidence-based pedagogical practices. TAs predicted the most common incorrect answers introductory students would select after lecture-based instruction, then compared their predictions with actual data from introductory students followed by a class discussion. This reflection process can promote robust understanding of introductory student thinking patterns, which is essential for effective teaching that accounts for how introductory students make sense of physics concepts. Results reveal gaps between TAs’ perceptions and introductory student thinking, with TAs performing poorly on many of the analyzed questions. For example, TAs consistently overestimated that introductory physics students would use novice-like thinking in many situations posed in EMCS problems, i.e., they expected introductory physics students to make more novice-like errors than they actually did. These findings have important implications for effective instructional design, e.g., physics TAs who misunderstand introductory physics student capabilities may inadvertently create barriers to learning by spending valuable class time on either overscaffolding or underchallenging introductory physics learners and not spending time on pedagogical issues that are important to address.