Student Teachers’ Physics Knowledge and Sources of Knowledge to Explain Everyday Phenomena

Experience and intuition may help explain everyday phenomena. However, physics concepts cannot be induced directly from them. Learning physics requires an examination of the ideas of scientifically constructed theoretical frameworks, explaining coherently organized physics concepts. This research examined student teachers’ physics knowledge in terms of their everyday explanations and physical reasoning pertaining to everyday concepts. The way in which sources of knowledge influence student teachers’ physics learning was also examined. With this aim, a test comprising eight questions – with each question corresponding to an everyday context examining students’ everyday explanations, their reasoning and epistemologies – was developed. By convenience sampling of two universities in Turkey, the test was offered to 360 student teachers who will teach primary and elementary level science in the future. After the relevant t-tests and variance analyses, the results indicated that there was context sensitivity with respect to physical explanations. In addition, in all of the contexts, propagated and fabricated knowledge allowed the highest scores in each context despite the different kinds of sources stated by student teachers. Educators should have insights about the nature of students’ knowledge and reasoning, and they should design their science related courses by considering students’ epistemologies to remove the hidden barrier between every day and formal concepts.