Prospective primary teachers and physics Pedagogical Content Knowledge, in Teaching and Learning Physics today: Challenges? Benefits

The main problems in primary teacher training are: competence in scientific Content Knowl\uacedge (CK), the difficulties for the novice in putting into practice Pedagogical Knowledge (PK) in relation to CK, the generalized difficulty in integrating PK and CK within a specific subject to build the related Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK). From the wide spectrum of research results it emerges that primary school teacher education requires a significant integration between the scientific subject matter and pedagogi\uaccal fields. In particular, knowledge of conceptual difficulties and teaching methods is necessary. The relevant open questions remaining are: how to test the PCK developed by teacher, how to promote competences related to phenomenological exploration, modeling and building formal thinking, how to construct competences that recognize student learning paths and processes. Educational proposals and classroom work documenta\uaction concerning active learning do not address the problem of whether the teacher is oriented to the teaching action, rather than to the students\u2019 learning paths. To investigate this point we prepared some questionnaires based on PCK methodology to study how prospective primary school teachers face CK and PCK with regard to: kinematics, relative motion, dynamics, thermal processes, energy, equilibrium of fluids. Each item of the question\uacnaires included: a first question (CK part) to explore how a specific subject knot is analyzed; a second part (PCK part) to explore how typical students answers on the specific question are discussed. The questionnaires were submitted to 120 trainees over a period of two years. We observed a systematic attitude to answer to the CK part, skipping the PCK part, where we looked at the categories\u2019 analysis of examples of students\u2019 answers. In very few cases some learning problems are associated with the reported students\u2019 answers. These results enlightened us with regard to the serious training needs of prospective primary school teachers in the scientific area