Horizon Content Knowledge and the Interdisciplinary Horizon in Physics Education Research

Author / Creator

PERC SM21 (2021)

Conferences

PERC SM21 Poster Session 1B (2021)

Available as

Online

Summary

Teachers who have only one year to instruct students often pay attention to and take intoaccount not only what their students have learned before, but what they will be studyingnext. To do so, a te...

Teachers who have only one year to instruct students often pay attention to and take intoaccount not only what their students have learned before, but what they will be studyingnext. To do so, a teacher must know the content beyond what they are teaching, allow-ing them to see how the content of their classroom is connected with preceding and latertopics in physics and areas outside of physics. Horizon Content Knowledge (HCK) is acomponent of teacher knowledge that emphasizes the structure and interconnectedness of adiscipline, the validity of a teachers content knowledge, and the values and sensibilities theteacher has about the discipline they are teaching. Given a particular location of instruc-tion, HCK enables a teacher to integrate content knowledge found in the larger landscape oftheir discipline. To investigate HCK in physics, we have interviewed in-service middle/highschool teachers about topics in physics. Preliminary data provide several examples of HCKin physics. Furthermore, we find evidence of an interdisciplinary horizon, which is howteachers incorporate interdisciplinary knowledge in the context of their current location ofinstruction. We find that interdisciplinary content, values, and validity of knowledge play a role in unifying physics concepts for these teachers while also influencing their teaching of physics.

Show More