Thai pre-service physics teachers' understanding of seeing an object

Abstract

© 2020 IOP Publishing Ltd. The important role of Faculty of Education, Chiang Mai University, Thailand, is to prepare smart teachers in the future of Thailand. In 2018, the 50 Thai pre-service physics teachers had been trained by a workshop on active learning in optics and exposed to the concept of light as early as the primary level of training. A set of 4 conceptual questions on seeing objects in different situations was presented to these pre-service physics teachers. They were asked to draw a ray diagram and explain how they see 1) an object which can illuminate light by itself, 2) an object reflecting light from other light sources, 3) an object in a dark room (light cannot pass through) and 4) a beam of LASER.. Pre-service physics teachers' understandings were classified by determining their explanations and ray diagrams. Misconceptions about light propagation and human eyes were also approached. Surprisingly, we found that most of them confused in using a ray diagram to explain how objects are seen and how light propagate into eyes. Most of them still have some misconceptions about seeing, they believe eyes can adjust to see objects in a completely dark room.