Investigating a science teacher’s pedagogical difficulties while teaching 7th grade force and motion unit

The aim of the study is to determine a science teacher’s pedagogical difficulties emerging from teaching physics topics to gifted students and to investigate how the teacher overcomes the difficulties. The study was conducted in a qualitative nature with a case study containing of a science teacher and three physics topics; work and energy, basic machines, and friction force. The data was collected by using semi-structured interviews, classroom observations, and field notes. After collecting the data, content analysis was used to determine pedagogical difficulties for each data. According to the findings of the analysis, we can group the findings in four stages. (1) Gifted students need to engage in enrichment activities: The teacher should plan alternative activities owing to the fact that the gifted students can easily understand regular seventh grade science curriculum. (2) Gifted students can interrogate the concepts and topics in detail. (3) The students demonstrated the out of goals and purposes: The students tried to design an experiment which was not tested in the classroom environment because of lack of the technical materials. (4) While overcoming the alternative concepts, the teacher is subjected to difficulties: The students had some alternative concepts such as the differences of work concepts between daily life and physics, simple machines include technological devices, and while calculating of potential and kinetic energy of an object, the students considered one variable affecting each kind of energy. Overcoming the alternative concepts lead to learning difficulties for students. As results, gifted students have different characteristics in science classroom than their peers. The data obtained from classroom observation in this study is parallel with gifted students’ characteristics. Each characteristic of students causes many difficulties for the teacher. In order to handle the difficulties, the teacher has developed some strategies emerging from her experience