Towards an Early Physics approach for secondary students

Some traditional approaches to teaching Physics at the secondary level of instruction have disclosed their limits, especially in distance learning. A consequence of such limits seems to be a somewhat diffused lack of students’ scientific abilities, mainly caused by their learning difficulties. To overcome the shortcoming of tradition, we stimulated some teachers to get involved in a new teaching approach to develop their awareness of these limits and difficulties and exploit their PCK (Pedagogical Content Knowledge). This approach explores and intercepts the main learning features and needs in the first years of Physics studies. For that reason and the analogy in Math Education, we named it Early Physics.


Introduction
Different approaches have been proposed for successful Physics learning [1][2][3][4][5][6], mainly in college courses for introductory physics during the last decade.Some [1][2][3][4][5] focused on the content building of knowledge [1,2], others on the epistemological improvement [6], suggesting thinking like scientists [1,3,7]."Adoption of research-based instructional strategies remains surprisingly low, despite a large body of physics education research (PER) spanning over two decades, and extensive dissemination efforts by physics education researchers and innovators" [8].Traditional lectures, based on teacherfocused, with passive students, still reign as the instructional strategy of choices [8,9].To overcome the adoption of a traditional approach towards an innovative one, many efforts in teachers' in-service and pre-service programs have been spent [10][11][12].Meanwhile, the research has devoted insightful works in conceptualising Physics teachers' knowledge regarding how to train pre-service or in-service teachers [13], concerning the way of defining teachers' PCK [14,15], also specifically to Physics teachers [16], the way teachers embody Math and Phys knowledge [17,18], and how teachers' PCK affects students' motivation [19], students' future-scaffolding skills development [20], or argumentation skills [21,22].Teacher preparation programs are delineated according to how the learning is conceived, such as the acquisition of knowledge -the cognitive, constructivist perspectiveand the use of knowledge -the situated, socio-cultural perspective - [10,23].Integrating teacher knowledge into training programs fulfils some requirements but, at the same time, does even not always take into account teachers' attitudes and beliefs.Furthermore, instruction changes due to the COVID pandemic spread out and followed restrictions duties, amplified traditional teaching limits [24,25] and revealed even more deeply difficulties in Physics learning [25,26,27].Conducting lessons and discourses in remote mode implies rethinking teaching practice to account for learning outcomes [26].The limit could have become an opportunity and a challenge to promote and innovate practices for Physics teaching [28] in a different manner.This contribution presents an example of developing a program and guiding Physics teachers to change their practices from traditional to active learning, from remote to classroom activities.This contribution is divided into three parts, which follow how we promoted our in-service professional program: • Teachers' awareness of students' difficulties.
• Teachers' implementation of classroom activities with a new approach.In the adopted program, we aimed to improve teachers' knowledge about using Maths in Physics [29,30] and Phys/Math interplay [17,18] and then focus on teachers' practices for implementing innovation.

Teachers' awareness of students' difficulties
To face Physics students' difficulties and make teachers aware of them, we suggested teachers a simple analogy helping to feature what they encounter in their teaching activities.This analogy is how we used to describe students' difficulties based on literature works about their definition [31,32].The analogy comes from the definition of learning disorder dyslexia [33].We refer to dyslexia for the external effects (what appears in terms of difficulties a dyslexic student conveys).Of course, from a cognitive point of view, the origin of difficulties is different.They have in common the effect over the semantic structure of languages: for a dyslexic student, the spoken/written language; for a student with difficulty in Physics, the algebraic language used in a Physics context.And this is exactly what happens to many Physics students: they struggle with using Maths to describe the physical world [32,34].If we "translate" the most common difficulties in dyslexia disorder for Physics learners, we find how the analogy works (Table 1): Table 1.Principal Dyslexia Learning Disorder features and the corresponding Physics learning ones.

Confuse letters Confuse Maths writings
See letters moving around reading Forget the correct order and position of variables and constants when writing formulas Find it very hard to remember lots of instruction Forget the order of instructions and procedures for problem-solving Have trouble telling and recognising left from right Have troubles to predict a phenomenological behavior or simply to describe it Be slow in requesting more thinking time to remember the right word Forget the right words to tell something about physics description

Memorise sequences
Memorise sequences to derive a physical law

Organise themselves
Organise their studies The analogy does not mean that Physics learning difficulties have to be treated as they would belong to Learning Disorders.The analogy amplifies natural and mathematical language's role in the Physics learning process.As there are strategies to support dyslexic students, we suppose we could support Physics learners in the same manner.So, transposing the analogy to strategies' instructions from dyslexia compensating tools to Physics teaching instruction, strategies should include: • to find different ways to present and resolve problems; • to emphasise how things work; • to narrate and tell in more detailed descriptions of facts and observations; • to sketch and draw pictures, doing experiments.These tools needed to be integrated into designing the approach to adopt in classroom activities.We advised this need to promote meaningful learning by identifying an approach specifically tailored to students' mindset growth toward Physics learning [1,35].We used the analogy to focus on Physics learners' difficulties from two different standpoints: one that arises from Maths integration in Physics and one from epistemology.In the program developed, we aimed to overcome the first one promoting Physics teachers' revision of their PCK towards a deeper Phys/Maths integration in their practices, and the second followed by the features of the approach we assumed to adopt.

Teachers' PCK revision
To promote innovation in the learning processes, we first focused our attention on teachers' PCK [36][37][38].We found that the teachers' prevalent PCK pattern in Phys/Math interplay [18] is the application one [36].This pattern is a teacher footprint affecting students' learning features [36].The teachers we observed (also by using video-recorded lessons) usually engage students in their lesson activities, supporting the classroom discourses with direct questions finalised to obtain a specific and unique answer expressed by the value of a measurable quantity.Fewer teachers are interested in asking students how it is received, why, or if the mathematical result has a physical meaning.This kind of question gives less emphasis on activating reasoning skills in the discourses between teachers and students [39].Reflecting on the findings from observations and classroom discourses' analysis, teachers themselves recognised that the students' main difficulties originated from a sort of cognitive bottling [37,38]: students' efforts are devoted to memorising formulas rather than making hypotheses and understanding phenomenological situations or reasoning them [36][37][38].Students fail to manipulate all together meanings and languages: we pinpointed this feature as a form of cognitive bottling, well-depicted by the analogy between dyslexia learning disorder and Physics difficulties.Therefore, based on the findings of the monitored teachers, we guided them towards an in-deep review of their PCK.This was an important step forward in the program we adopted.The awareness of students' difficulties and teachers' PCK sustained the need to change teaching practices.We guided teachers to achieve the following goals in the revision process involved: • testing a new Physics teaching approach; • reviewing teachers' Content Knowledge for Physics teaching (CKT) [40] to build learning sequences supported by clear cognitive instructions.

Teachers' implementation of classroom activities with a new approach
We referred to the following theoretical frameworks for adopting a new approach in teacher practices, including what we pinpointed as instructional strategies to overcome students' difficulties.The lack of algebraic thinking [32,34] resides in how students learn Maths and use Maths competencies for Physics [17,29,[41][42][43][44].We suggested that teachers involved in our program (which in Italian secondary schools teach both Maths and Physics) should devote more attention to their practices towards the development of algebraic thinking.We individuated two approaches in Maths Education that could help teachers fulfil this aim: Early Algebra [45] and the Three Uses of Variables (3UV) [46].Using an Early Algebra approach, the teacher focuses on Maths languages and how to represent mathematical quantities, relations, and models instead of procedural resolutions, mnemonic adoption, and procedural use of mathematical laws.The conceptual change (from a teaching point of view) concerns using multiple representations as a tool for reasoning, for learning to explain and argue.The theoretical framework treats Maths as a language and emphasises processes and models [45].
On the other side, the 3UV approach refers to the meaning of the variable, which defines a numerical quantity, its relationship with others, or sometimes physical quantities and relations [46].The teacher enables students' cognitive abstraction skills, stressing the conceptual understanding of using variables involved in Maths processes.Using these approaches, the teacher fulfils the following aims in students' learning: developing skills of reasoning, learning deep content knowledge, and building flexible cognitive mind maps and well-conceptualised disciplinary language representations.These Maths teaching theoretical frameworks enhance the role of Multiple Representations as a cognitive tool to build algebraic thinking.We assumed a coherence building of integrating Phys/Maths knowledge by using Multiple Representations also in the Physics teaching process [47,48].By using Multiple Representations, teachers must continuously stress switching and translating disciplinary languages from one to another in instructional activities.Passing from one disciplinary language to the other, the teacher infers students' learning skills of reasoning and representation.It could be considered a process between disciplinary languages (Fig. 1) where each component sustains and interacts with the others.
Figure 1.Physics disciplinary language/description process of interaction/integration.These reference frameworks cover the standpoint concerning Maths integration in Physics.Regarding the epistemological standpoint, we referred to the ISLE (Investigative Science Learning Environment) approach [1].We chose to adopt this approach because it is an example of authentic epistemological inquiry [1,49].
We might refer to an Early Physics approach when integrating the language/description process in the framework of ISLE's activities in teaching practices we ought to promote in Italian classrooms.This overcomes the two main cognitive bottlings we recognise in Physics learning.The first one is based on considering every Physics description as a language.As every Physics description is a language, it has its semantics, its vocabulary, and, of course, its grammar [50].If, in the learning sequence, we maintain "obscure" some language aspects -thinking that students alone could recollect and build information -our discourse seems to students the same as it is for a dyslexic learner (challenging to manage a significant number of things).Like in the ISLE approach [1], the passage from one language/description to another becomes clear in the learning process for content knowledge building.This overcomes the second cognitive bottling that concerns the Physics epistemological proper context [1,50].

Validating Early Physics approach in classroom activities
The teachers engaged in their PCK revision were suddenly coached to implement classroom activities (Tab. 1) with these features: (i) knowledge building through the so-called knowledge segments integration [51] in the framework of ISLE content knowledge building [1]; (ii) extensive use of multiple representations [47,48].PHET (https://phet.colorado.edu)interactive simulations and videos from observational and testing experiments (https://www.islephysics.net),such as those used in the ISLE approach [1].We realised activities on the platform used by schools, such as Google Meet, Zoom or Teams, during distance learning and in presence.We continue using DESMOS in lessons with students' devices or as homework assignments.Through DESMOS activities, we could analyse students' answers with teachers, discovering their difficulties, intuitive knowledge, and conceptual doubts in a manner teachers never experienced.At the same time, most teachers have improved the awareness of their use of disciplinary languages.They have seriously reflected on how to scaffold their teaching better, implementing the ISLE approach and reviewing their works through the analysis of their video-recorded lessons.

Conclusions
During the last two years, we engaged some teachers in revising how they teach Physics [36].We observed their lessons for a prolonged time, then analysed them with their teaching experience's main features.We mainly emphasised their role in the Math/Phys interplay patterns [18,36].According to the curriculum requests and the tradition in instructional strategies, this is particularly relevant for Italian Physics teachers.Furthermore, we might conclude from our observations that the teachers' PCK is a footprint on learning outcomes [36].Meanwhile, we might refer to some students' difficulties as conceptual bottling, which affects learning in strict analogy with a dyslexia learning disorder.As teachers change their approaches to supporting dyslexic students, they might enlighten new approaches to support Physics learners.We tried to coach teachers in adopting an approach based on two different well-tested experiences: one comes from Maths teaching (Early Algebra [45] and 3UV [46]), whereas the second descends from Physics teaching (the ISLE approach [1]).We will hopefully continue our trial activities in different secondary schools.But moreover, we will continue to support our teachers by involving them in the Early Physics approach as the aim of our inservice teachers' training and professional development.
https://teacher.desmos.org),which has high flexibility in content knowledge management, real interactivity, and a simultaneous control panel.The DESMOS activity was also built by integrating