Slovak supervisor's report on PhD Thesis:
Claudio Fazio: Educational reconstruction of the physics content to be taught and pedagogical content knowledge implementation by using information and communication technologies
The Thesis describes the educational research performed by the candidate in preparing in - service training for future teachers of physics at secondary schools. The Thesis is concerned in detail with teacher training in a particular domain of physics - heat and temperature.
The first three chapters and a part of the fourth one represent a detailed introduction, the research performed by the author is described in chapters five and six.
In introductory chapters the author proved that he is familiar with modern tendencies in physics education. His approach is close to the constructivist school of thinking and I believe that the educational studies in recent past have demonstrated that this approach is a correct one.
Before describing in more detail some part of the introductory chapters, let me try to sum up where the problem probably resides. We, physicists and physics teachers, have learned during our secondary school years and years spent at the university and subsequent years spent in research and teaching some concepts, laws and relations of modern physics. We have long forgotten our problems with understanding physics at secondary school. Now, we are frequently trying to write textbooks for secondary schools and training future teachers of physics from the point of view of our present understanding of physics. The idea is nice, but it has one problem - it does not work. Most of secondary school students can only pretend they learn physics in this way - at the prize of memorizing the context of textbooks and forgetting it soon after the exams.
The constructivist school tries to teach physics taking into account the real knowledge, attitudes and ideas of the secondary school students.
Let me now mention a few ideas contained in the introductory chapters of the present Thesis. In p. 7 the author quotes Gilbert et al. results showing that physics teaching not taking into account the conflict between scientific and spontaneous models of pupils leads to problems. In p. 16 the author reviews the basic principles of the approach of the group he is working in, one of them consisting for putting future physics teachers into the same learning environment they are supposed to find in their future classrooms. The psycho-cognitive constructivist approach is wel described in Section 2.2.
Chapter 5 and 6 describe the work and results of the author. in section 5.2 the author presents TPL }Teaching/Learnig Pathways in educational reconstruction of heat transfer processes. Later on he gives a brief review of the programing/simulation environment STELLA permitting to model heat transfer processes on a computer.
A substantial part of the author's work consists in proposing, delivering and analyzing pedagogical materials which can be found in the Appendix to Chapter 5.
In Chapter 6 the author presents his TLP experimental data and the results of analysis of this data. Results of his analysis are summarized in Sections 6.1 and 6.2.
The data analyzed in the present Thesis consisted of
-empirical material coming from answer tests,
-worksheets for TT (Trainee Teachers),
-direct observation of TT's discussions,
-learning units prepared by TTs,
-open interviews with all participants at the workshops.
The answers to the research questions are formulated in Sect. 6.2. The answers can be summarized as follows:
- The initial subject matter understanding was not adequate to develop the disciplinary competences required by teaching approaches which focused upon modeling the real world.
- The implemented teaching/learning environment has been effective in guiding TTs towards the construction of the Pedagogical content knowledge.
- Certain familiarity with the pedagogical tools, useful for the required modeling procedures, has been essential in order to conceptualize the physics models.
- The learning units realized by TTs presented evidence that the acquired abilities in modeling procedures can be effectively translated into the ability to transfer knowledge to pupils.
The author also criticizes the present education of future teachers by noting (in p. 162) that future teachers do posses necessary knowledge of concepts and laws of physics, although the knowledge is mostly "entrusted to memory".
Summing up, I am convinced that the author of the present Thesis demonstrated his ability to conduct individual research work and bring valuable results. For this reason I recommend that he will be delivered the scientific title PhD.
Finally, I have a question for general discussion. Temperature, heat and heat transfer is a topic which is usually considered as relatively easy to understand and to teach.Secondary school physics curriculum is full of topics, some of them considered more difficult than temperature and heat. What would you recommend to an institution preparing future teachers of physics to do in order that their future teachers, when leaving the institution, would be able to teach all physics topics well?
Bratislava, May 3rd, 2006
Jan Pisut