Content Knowledge for Teaching Energy: Framework and Assessment

In my talk I will discuss the concept of Content Knowledge for Teaching (CKT) a specific topic and an application of this concept to teaching energy. I will report report on a multi-year, multi-institutional effort to study physics teachers knowledge for teaching energy. In particular, I describe the framework that we developed to clarify CKT construct in the context of high school energy learning and the process through which we developed, tested, and refined a “paper-and-pencil” assessment that we administered to several hundred physics teachers and physics majors. I will report on the findings of the assessment and discuss the role of subject matter knowledge in the content knowledge for teaching.