We have designed a course that uses the literature and products of physics education research to deepen future teachers’ content knowledge while also developing their
abilities to recognize and understand the common student ideas that exist in the classroom. Our course contains features of a discipline-based PCK-oriented course, as
suggested by van Driel et al., and our efforts to assess the effectiveness of the course to improve PCK advances the agenda of increasing the research base on the role of
discipline-specific PCK in teacher preparation put forth by these researchers [19,20]. Our focus within the very broad area of PCK on knowledge of student ideas is common to
many PCK frameworks in science education. This focus is also a central component of the framework described by Ball and collaborators in mathematics education research
[23,24]. Magnusson et al. [21] point out that addressing common student ideas, even when teachers know that they exist, is not trivial. Having future teachers work through
curricular materials that contain instructional strategies explicitly designed to target specific student difficulties can provide touchstone examples from which teachers
can build, thus strengthening that aspect of their pedagogical content knowledge.