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Global society is facing major challenges, which are to be met by pursuing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Digitalization processes bring many opportunities for achieving SDGs, but they also bring pitfalls. For example, on one hand, social media makes it easier for more parts of society to participate. On the other hand, the ability to rapidly circulate unfiltered information can lead to the spread of misinformation and subsequently interfere with the achievement of SDGs. This effect could be observed during the COVID-19 pandemic and continues to occur in the context of climate change. Young people are especially likely to be exposed to misinformation on social media. With this in mind, it is enormously important for schools to prepare young people to critically handle the overload of information available online. The aim of this study was to provide future middle and high school teachers with a fruitful approach to foster a critical attitude towards information in classrooms. To this end, we expanded an existing approach by implementing active, technique-based inoculation and technique-based debunking within the COVID-19 content framework in a teacher education course. This implementation was monitored by a mixed-methods study with n = 24 future middle and high school teachers who participated in two courses in subsequent semesters. By performing statistical analysis on pretests and posttests and qualitative content analysis on reflective journal entries, we found that future teachers’ self-efficacy expectations for detecting and debunking misinformation, as well as their debunking skills, increased throughout the courses. In addition, our results show that future teachers perceive active, technology-based inoculation as a helpful approach for their future teaching. They feel that this approach can be a way to implement education for sustainable development in schools with a focus on the promotion of critical thinking. In summary, we believe that the approach presented in this article may be beneficial for teaching the critical treatment of information in various thematic contexts.

ZusammenfassungDer aktuelle Klimawandel stellt unsere Gesellschaft, besonders zukünftige Generationen, vor große Herausforderungen. Ein grundlegendes Verständnis des Klimawandels kann nicht nur Jugendlichen dabei helfen, falsche oder widersprüchliche Darstellungen besser einzuschätzen, um so am gesellschaftlichen Diskurs zum Thema Klimawandel teilhaben zu können. Um Aussagen über das Verständnis von zentralen fachlichen Inhalten zum Klimawandel zuverlässig treffen zu können, braucht es geeignete Testinstrumente. Für die Entwicklung eines Concept Inventories zu den naturwissenschaftlichen Grundlagen des Klimawandels (den wir CCCI-422 nennen) wurden zentrale fachliche Inhalte identifiziert, offene Aufgaben entwickelt und schließlich Distraktoren und Attraktoren aus insgesamt über 50 Interviews abgeleitet. Anschließend wurde der Concept Inventory in mehreren Pilotierungs- und Validierungsstudien eingesetzt, um so unterschiedliche Argumente, die für den Einsatz des CCCI-422 sprechen, zu sammeln. Es wurde etwa eine Teilstudie durchgeführt, um ein Argument für die externe Validität der Testwertinterpretation zu formulieren. Dabei zeigten sich theoretisch angenommene Unterschiede auch in den Personenfähigkeiten. In zwei weiteren Teilstudien konnten zusätzlich Argumente für die Instruktionssensitivität des Concept Inventories formuliert werden. Als Argument für die Konstruktvalidität lässt sich zudem auf Basis von Dimensionsanalysen eine eindimensionale sowie fünfdimensionale Struktur ableiten. Diese fünf Dimensionen entsprechen den fünf theoretisch abgeleiteten Inhaltsbereichen, wobei tendenziell Unterschied Wetter – Klima der leichteste und Atmosphäre unserer Erde der schwerste Inhaltsbereich sind. Wir plädieren daher dafür, dass der CCCI-422 abhängig vom Einsatzzweck als eindimensionaler oder fünfdimensionaler Concept Inventory genutzt werden kann. In diesem Beitrag wird der entwickelte Concept Inventory inklusive seinem Entstehungsprozess vorgestellt, der als Onlinematerial zur Nutzung zur Verfügung gestellt wird.

[This paper is part of the Focused Collection on Curriculum Development: Theory into Design.] Although curriculum design has a long tradition in physics education research (PER), it is often criticized for unclear or inconsistent methodologies. One reason is that the theory-into-practice aspect frequently remains blurred. Only a few curriculum projects have given insight into the rule-guided translation of learning theories into curricula and curriculum materials. This paper reports how design-based research (DBR) was used as a framework for systematic curriculum development during a six-year-long project on a middle school optics curriculum. One key feature of DBR is to deduce design principles from theoretical and empirical foundations, apply them in the creation of a curriculum, and refine them in response to data collected during successions of implementation. The design principles guide and structure the iterative cycles of design—intervention—redesign and make a systematic and nevertheless flexible design process transparent. We provide the level of detail needed to make clear how design principles were developed and applied in the creation of the optics curriculum. In addition, we use many examples to illustrate how and why the initial set of design principles was refined. We report the results of a large scale evaluation of the curriculum that shows its superiority to conventional instruction. Finally, we summarize the lessons learned during this project. This shall support other scholars in designing and implementing curricula. Version of record

Teachers’ diagnostic competence is fundamental for supporting students’ individual learning processes and must be fostered in teacher education. Following a design-based research approach, a learning environment is developed focusing on preservice physics teachers’ diagnostic competence in diagnosing students’ conceptions. A core element of the learning environment are video vignettes of high school students solving tasks on mechanics. The learning arrangement was implemented in a bachelor’s level physics didactics course. We aimed to identify supportive and obstructive elements for the preservice teachers’ learning processes when training with the video vignettes to inform the redesign of the learning environment. The working phases centred around the training video vignettes were videotaped and data of four groups of preservice teachers was analysed with thick description. We reconstructed preservice teachers’ intentions of action to gather a deeper understanding of supportive and obstructive elements. Among other findings, results show that preservice teachers’ gaps in content knowledge highly influence the training situation.

How students plan and conduct experimental inquiry has been a major focus in science education research. However, experimental inquiry is not representative for all scientific investigations. So, a focus on experimental inquiry can cause the impression that there is a “single scientific method”. We are currently developing learning environments that focus on another type of inquiry using environmental data from an online data repository. We call this scientific investigation by data exploration. Due to the increased variability in environmental data, ideas of inferential statistics are of extreme importance because causal relationships cannot be directly derived. Hence, the focus of our learning environment is to support students’ skills which are relevant for performing scientific investigations by data exploration. The main goal during the intervention for the students is to identify factors influencing the particulate matter concentration in an Austrian city. In this article, we report the evaluation of our intervention with a cohort of 27 secondary school students. The evaluation shows that students regard particulate matter as a highly interesting. Furthermore, students self-report a high intrinsic motivation during the intervention and feel more informed about the environmental issue of particulate matter after the intervention. However, a few starting points for further improvement of the learning environment were identified and are discussed in this article.

The perception of our surroundings is determined by vision to a large extent. Human vision is not only able to generate a three-dimensional impression of three-dimensional objects, but also of two-dimensional objects. Nowadays, 3D-technologies even provide additional opportunities to trigger visual 3D-perception. 3D-vision provides a context for teaching and learning several topics in physics. In order to develop a learning environment for high school students, following the framework of educational reconstruction, students’ perspectives must be considered. As we could not find any documented students’ conceptions on 3D-vision, an exploratory study was conducted. Main aim of this study was to provide a broad overview on students’ perspectives on 3D-vision. Therefore, the questionnaire mainly consisted of open questions. The questionnaire was administered to Austrian secondary level students of two schools and was finally filled in completely by 215 students. Data was analysed by the means of qualitative content analysis and an inductive category system was developed. The results show that students mainly connect 3D-vision with 3D-technologies in cinemas. However, differences between junior and senior high school students were detected. While junior high school students mainly associate 3D-vision with cinemas, senior high school students additionally mention the physiological process of 3D-vision as well as 3D-technology.

Recently, teacher education in Austria has undergone major changes. Among other factors, profound content knowledge is essential for the professionalisation of teachers and the later quality of their instruction at school. First evaluation findings of our physics teacher education program revealed year two students’ deficits in the conceptual understanding of introductory mechanics. Since conceptual difficulties hinder meaningful learning of advanced topics and the development of pedagogical content knowledge, we adapted courses by integrating parts of tutorials of the University of Washington into the existing courses without changing the entire teaching mode. We used a pre-post-test design to investigate the impact of these short phases of the tutorial approach. The results indicate that this kind of learning opportunities supports students’ conceptual understanding in the field of mechanics. It shows a positive impact on content knowledge and self-efficacy. Students’ feedback on the tutorial approach shows that most students of the intervention groups appreciated this approach and its usefulness. In addition, all students pleaded for continuing the tutorial approach in the calculus-based mechanic course.

This article reports how physics pre-service teachers (PSTs) organize their investigations during an exploratory data analysis scenario, which we call scientific investigations by data exploration. In order to analyze the PSTs’ investigations, we developed a learning environment in which learners investigate aspects influencing the particulate matter concentration in an Austrian city. Audio documentation and written learner protocols were analyzed using qualitative content analyses, resulting in flowcharts describing the different types of investigations the PSTs conducted. In this analysis, we differentiate between investigations on a micro-level (a single investigation), and investigations on a macro-level. Findings show that the pre-service teachers follow three different approaches: some always start their investigations with a research question, some switch between exploratory and targeted investigations and a few conducted only exploratory investigations. In this article we provide exploratory insights into the strategies students use.

Introductory electricity is a difficult topic for most lower secondary students, especially the development of an adequate conceptualisation of voltage is seen as a major obstacle. A few instructional concepts concerning the teaching and learning of physics have been proven helpful when it comes to constructing conceptual knowledge. For example, the choice of content structure, meaningful elementarisation of basic concepts or adequate use of analogies. What has not been in the focus is how physics school textbooks consider these factors. In this article, we compare four widely used Austrian physics school textbooks concerning their content structure, definition of basic concepts and their use of analogies. Results show that the concept of ‘content structure diagrams’ is a useful tool to analyse schoolbooks. Although Austria has a compulsory syllabus, the four schoolbooks greatly differ in the amount of covered content and interlinking of concepts. However, a few common approaches regarding the sequencing of the concepts were identified and are reported in this article.

Practical activities are traditionally perceived as essential feature for physics teaching. Empirical results, however, are not encouraging. Though many educational goals may be pursued, most practical arrangements just focus on content knowledge without being very successful. We implemented an instructional arrangement centring on one aspect of ‘The Nature of Science’. Students’ lab reports are in the focus of this approach. This strategy is based on the idea of students repeating practical activities done earlier. Through reflective phases students were confronted with rigid rituals within their own practical experiences and the nature of scientific inquiry on the level of scientific research.

Smartphones and mobile communication have become an important part of students’ daily lives. Little by little mobile devices are also introduced into the classroom, as they offer a variety of possibilities for learning applications. From the physical perspective smartphones and their integrated sensors may also serve as handy measuring instruments. This study aimed at investigating which ideas a group of students connects to the smartphone as a measuring device after being confronted with a small set of experiments. Continuing feedback and follow-up interviews showed that the students have very different ideas about whether the smartphone is a useful tool for (school) experiments and whether it is a reliable instrument or not.

It is commonly agreed that experiments play a central role in teaching and learning physics. Recently, Inquiry-Based Learning (IBL) has been introduced into science teaching in many countries, thus giving another boostfor experiments. From a didactical point of view, experiments can serve a number of different goals in teaching and learning physics. First of all, experiments can support learners in understanding some of the centralconcepts of physics. Besides this function of “learning physics”, empirical evidence shows that experimental work in general has a high potential for promoting “learning about science” and finally “doing science”. Promoting aspects of how science works has become important, as the ideas of scientific literacy and competence orientation have been established as central educational goals in many national education systems. However, empirical studies show that the reality in schools does not match these expectations. Conventional physics classes still aim only at the mastery of content, and experiments that cognitively activate students and address issues related to the Nature of Science (NOS) have not been implemented extensively. The reasons for this can be found in teachers’ attitudes and beliefs, as well as in their PCK concerning experiments and scientific knowledge production. In past decades in Austria, teacher education did not focus a great deal on the didactical aspects of experiments or their integration into physics classes in order to promote aspects of scientific literacy and competence orientation. Furthermore, there is a lack of high quality continuing professional development courses that promote the concepts of Inquiry-Based Learning (IBL) in combination with relevant ideas of NOS. The present study examines inservice teachers’ beliefs about the function of experiments in science teaching and their meaningful integration into science classes. In the form of case studies, we follow the professional development of teachers in this field during continuing teacher training.

Physics as a school subject is in general very unpopular. This fact is especially true for the situation in Austria. PISA results show that motivation, interest and self-efficacy of Austrian highschool students are significantly lower than the OECD average. In addition, a significant gender-gap in disadvantage for girls was shown. In general, one reason for low interest which was identified by previous research is that physics instruction is frequently decontextualized and students can hardly see any relevance of understanding physics for their lives. On the contrary, science and technology play a crucial and increasingly important role in our lives and in our globalized society. At the same time, edutainment focusing on science topics is booming. Interest studies like the ROSE-study may give reasons for this discrepancy: the choice of contexts does often not meet students’ interests. This contribution reports the development of a context-oriented learning environment on light pollution to stimulate learning processes and at the same time interest in introductory optics.

It is beyond doubt that teacher education plays a crucial role in the development of the educational system. Following the educational reconstruction for teacher education model [1], a clarification of teacher students’ beliefs seems mandatory in order to improve the education of future physics teachers. The main aim of this research project was to determine beliefs of physics teacher students about high quality physics instruction at school. Therefore, interviews with 23 physics teacher students and an additional case study with six teacher students were conducted. Several beliefs of teacher students’ such as experiments rise students’ interest and with the help of experiments physical contents can be memorized better were found.

The relationship between teachers’ beliefs, topic specific professional knowledge (TSPK) and their teaching practice has driven research in the field of teachers’ professional knowledge for the last decades. Currently in Austria teacher education programmes and induction phases are reformed. In the course of the development of new curricula and courses knowledge about their quality and effectiveness is essential. Therefore, appropriate test-instruments are needed. This contribution presents results of a pilot study focusing on teacher students and first-year teachers TSPK and beliefs. In order to investigate whether and to what extent TSPK varies between teacher students and fully educated teachers, the presented study focuses on the comparison of TSPK-test results of pre-service teachers and first year teachers in Austria. Additionally, the relationship between TSPK, beliefs and knowledge of the Nature of Science was investigated.

Statistical ideas play a vital role in scientific investigations. For students enrolling in physics-related courses at university, the need to interpret data is set from the start. Analysing graphical representations of data is seen as one way to acquaint students with statistical thinking without relying on pre-knowledge about formal statistics for applying more sophisticated methods like multiple regression. We designed a learning environment, which supports students in understanding the exploratory analysis of multivariate datasets as well as the concept of multiple regression. For phase one of the learning path, we work with exploratory data analysis using the software TinkerPlots, which has several major advantages in contrast to conventional software. Only in phase two formal inferential statistics is applied. We have chosen a context-oriented approach for this learning environment, using the particulate matter concentration in an Austrian city as topic. By providing data from online data repositories in a simplified way, students get the opportunity to work with real data. The amount of this data exceeds the number of measurements collected in typical training labs in an authentic and feasible way. In this article, the design of the intervention and a range of results originating from the triggered learning paths will be presented and discussed. To sum it up, we illustrate advantages and opportunities of the use of innovative software, online data repositories and informal statistics for a first introduction of methods of formal statistics like multiple regression.

The Austrian Ministry of Education has set up several measures as reaction to the low results in international student assessment studies like TIMSS or PISA: On the level of systematic monitoring, one strategy was to implement educational subject specific standards to change the focus of the educational system from input to output orientation. Subject specific standards and standardization has become one main issue in Austrian education in the last decade. There are several reasons why teachers encounter the issue of standards with resentments. One is that teachers were not provided with sufficient supportive measures in time, like teacher training courses or teaching materials, for a paradigmatic change in their teaching culture. Due to this shortfall, a number of beliefs and misconceptions about competence oriented teaching have spread. There seems to be a high tendency among teachers to interpret competence orientation only in terms of implementing open learning strategies which do not require guidance by the teachers at all. In the field of science teaching this idea of open, unguided learning manifests in the increase of Inquiry Based Learning (IBL), which of course can only be one way of promoting competence orientation. However, our work with teachers suggests that IBL is frequently just perceived as doing experimental work without any interference by the teacher. This situation served as the starting point for a research project which investigates teachers’ beliefs about competence orientation and IBL. As sample we chose teachers who applied for a continuous professional development programme (CMSE) focusing on the promotion of students’ subject specific competences. Our results show that even this preselected sample, which is about to take the challenge of competence orientation, struggles with competence orientation and the introduction of IBL.

Learning physics is a difficult endeavour since our everyday experiences frequently result in naive theories which do not or do only partly correspond to scientific concepts. If instruction does not take these well-known conceptions as a starting point for learning processes and neglects typical learning difficulties, it is likely to be non-effective. This holds true for all areas of physics, also for introductory optics. This article reports the development and evaluation of research based teaching materials. These teaching materials take domain specific learning problems known from research into account. In addition, they are based on an atypical content structure which was developed based on Design Based Research. The current version of the optics course was evaluated in year 8 physics classes. The comparison of Austrian students’ achievement after conventional instruction in optics in year 8 (N = 16 classes) and students instructed with our optics course (N = 5 classes) will be reported.

The quality of learning processes is mainly determined by the extent to which students' conceptions are addressed and thus conceptual change is triggered. Colour phenomena are a topic within initial instruction of optics which is challenging. A physically adequate concept of white light is crucial for being able to grasp the processes underlying colour formation. Our previous research suggests that misconceptions on white light may influence the conceptual understanding of colour phenomena. For the design of a learning environment on light and colours, the literature was reviewed. Then an explorative interview study with participants (N = 32), with and without instruction in introductory optics, was carried out. In addition, the representations used for white light in Austrian physics schoolbooks were analysed. Based on the results of the literature review, the interview study and the schoolbook analysis, a learning environment was designed and tested in teaching experiments. The results indicate that learners often lack an adequate concept of white light even after instruction in introductory optics. This seems to cause learning difficulties concerning colour phenomena. On the other hand, the evaluation of our learning environment showed that students are able to gain a good conceptual understanding of colour phenomena if instruction takes these content specific learning difficulties into account.

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(VLID)4848733 Version of record