Discussing climate protection measures in physics classroom – Expert ranking on the importance of possible teaching beliefs

Abstract The new national physics curriculum for lower secondary schools in Austria requires that students in 8 th grade should learn how to classify and discuss the implementation of climate protection measures. Physics teachers can have different attitudes about teaching such socio-scientific issues and face multiple challenges. For example, it is unusual for them to link physics content with political and economic dimensions, as it is the case in discussing climate protection measures. According to the Theory of Planned Behavior, the ERTE-model, and the Refined Consensus Model of PCK, addressing salient teaching beliefs in teacher training could foster their willingness and intention to implement educational innovations in their classroom. This contribution is about a preliminary study to an in-service teacher questionnaire, for which we want to reduce a large amount of diverse teaching belief items. Therefore, experts (n=25) ranked 74 belief items regarding the expected importance for teachers and reported unclarities about the items. Accordingly, 18 items will be used in the main study as they were considered “important”. In addition, we justify the inclusion of 16 more items with a lower rating in the final questionnaire due to theoretical reasons or our interest in developing a teacher training program.