Abstract
This thesis reports on an investigation of a novel method of measuring high school physics teachers’ personal pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) within kinematics and dynamics. The novel method is for participating teachers to use adaptive comparative judgement software to rank the questions of the Force Concept Inventory (FCI) on how difficult they believe their high school physics students will find them. The rankings of two participating teachers were compared with how well their students actually performed on the FCI to generate a measure of their PCK. This measurement was verified by making a second measurement of these teachers’ personal PCK using interviews with Content Representations (CoRe) as question prompts. Correlation between these two measurements suggests the novel ranking task shows promise as a PCK tool for physics. Other findings from this research study include the first published FCI results of high school students in New Zealand, the strong influence that the New Zealand National Certificate of Education Achievement (NCEA) external examinations have on lesson design, and how little influence student FCI results have on teacher reflection.