90
age, performed better than random guessing at identifying introductory
students’ difficulties with FCI content, they did not identify many common
difficulties that introductory physics students have, even after traditional
instruction. Moreover, the ability to correctly identify students’ difficulties
was not correlated with the teaching experience of the physics instructors
or the background of the TAs.
*Work supported by the National Science Foundation
(TAs): knowledge of introductory student difficulties related to mechanics
as they are revealed by the FCI. For each item on the FCI, the instructors
and TAs were asked to identify the most common incorrect answer choice
of introductory physics students. We also discussed the responses indi-
vidually with a few instructors. Then, we used FCI pre-test and post-test
data from a large population (~900) of introductory physics students to
assess this aspect of pedagogical content knowledge of physics instructors
and TAs. We find that while both physics instructors and TAs, on aver-
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