Description
What happens when the curriculum is quietly written by the examiner? This presentation was born from a pilot study involving high school physics teachers in New Zealand, and found a disquieting pattern: that national assessment structures can shape —and constrain— what teachers choose to teach, sometimes at the direct expense of foundational understanding.
In interviews conducted as part of a mixed-methods investigation into teachers' pedagogical content knowledge, one participating teacher openly acknowledged spending little time on acceleration —a concept central to Newtonian mechanics— because it had rarely featured in NCEA external examinations over the previous decade. His reasoning was pragmatic, even logical. But the consequences were measurable. Results from the Force Concept Inventory (FCI), administered to 63 students at the school, revealed that the vast majority held a 'pre-Newtonian' understanding of motion and forces. The pattern is consistent with international research, yet one that had gone largely unnoticed in the classroom.
For secondary educators, this raises a pointed question about professional autonomy: when curriculum documents are sparse and assessments fill the vacuum, who is really deciding what students learn? For tertiary educators, the stakes are equally concrete: students arrive in first-year physics carrying conceptual gaps that no amount of mathematical fluency can substitute.
This presentation invites educators across both sectors to consider what concept inventories like the FCI can reveal, how assessment design shapes pedagogy in ways that often go unexamined, and what a more research-informed approach to curriculum and professional development might look like in practice.
| I am the presenting author | Yes |
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