Meanings of physics mathematization in pre-service physics teachers

Abstract

Introduction. Physics teaching practice is permeated by the meaning that teachers constructed about the relationship between mathematics and physics, but this relationship often goes unnoticed by the teacher himself, because of their education where it is traditionally thoughtlessly assumed that “mathematics is the physics language.” Objective. In this work, we contribute to the comprehension of how modifying this reality in teacher training. To this end, we conducted a study on how is understanding physics and mathematics relationships by preservice teachers. Materials and methods. Data collection was done from observation of a nonparticipating classroom in two physics courses using an observation grid and a questionnaire. We made a content analysis. Results. We found that pre-service teachers consider the mastery of problem-solving equations as the primary medium for learning physics, but when they are asked to explain physics they usually opt for qualitative descriptions and pictorial representations not for equations. Conclusions. It means that they differentiate between a “mathematical part” of the phenomenon that is self-controlled as the basis of his physics learning and a “qualitative part” of the phenomenon that serves to explain physics. So, it seems that to teach physics they feel the need to explain conceptually without mathematics, while to learn physics they should concentrate on applying equations, which is paradoxical.