Conceptual hierarchy of physics leading to structured knowledge in physics teacher education

The main component of good physics teaching is good subject content. In physics, teacher needs to foster proper understanding of physics central concepts and laws and also give good understanding of its basic methods. For that, teachers need to develop metacognitive understanding of physics and its epistemology. This becomes possible only within the framework of well organized knowledge structure. This goal brings in focus the conceptual system as a whole and in particular its organization as hierarchical structure. In this study it is discussed, what kind of conceptual hierarchy can be useful as a vehicle in teacher education and on what characteristics of physics knowledge and methods these views are anchored. In particularly, the role of experimentality in creating the hierarchy of concepts and laws is discussed. In order to make these ideas useful metacognitive tools for learning, we have developed a kind of network representations to represent concepts, laws and their interrelationships. We discuss how these network representations are used in representing subject knowledge and how they can be used as a useful vehicle for ordering the knowledge as organized structures in pre-service teacher education.