ISMO KOPONEN and MAIJA NOUSIAINEN PRE-SERVICE PHYSICS TEACHERS’ UNDERSTANDING OF THE RELATIONAL STRUCTURE OF PHYSICS CONCEPTS: ORGANISING SUBJECT CONTENTS FOR PURPOSES OF TEACHING Received: 13 March 2011; Accepted: 2 March 2012 ABSTRACT. Good conceptual understanding of physics is based on understanding what the key concepts are and how they are related. This kind of understanding is especially important for physics teachers in planning how and in what order to introduce concepts in teaching; connections which tie concepts to each other give direction of progress—there is “flux of information” so that what was learned before provides the basis for learning new ideas. In this study, we discuss how such ordering of concepts can be made visible by using concept maps and how they can be used in analysing the students’ views and ideas about the inherent logic of the teaching plans. The approach discussed here is informed by the recent cognitively oriented ideas of knowledge organisation concentrating on simple knowledge organisation patterns and how they form the basis of more complex concept networks. The analysis of such concept networks is then very naturally based on the use of network theory on analysing the concept maps. The results show that even in well- connected maps, there can be abrupt changes in the information flux in the way knowledge is passed from the initial levels to the final levels. This suggests that handling the information content is very demanding and perhaps a very difficult skill for a pre- service teacher to master. KEY WORDS: concept maps, knowledge organisation, teacher education, teaching plans INTRODUCTION Scientific knowledge—in particular physics knowledge—is quite often described as webs or networks where concepts are linked to other concepts and principles (Anderson, 2001; Wilson, 1999; Thagard, 1992). The relational structure of concepts plays an essential role also in establishing the meaning of concepts because they cannot be conceived as isolated entities but instead as parts of the whole system of knowledge (diSessa, 2008; Thagard, 1992). In such a picture of knowledge, it is evident that the existing structure and relations within it also affect how the new concepts can be introduced as parts of the networks (Thagard, 1992). Moreover, the content-based relations between concepts also guide the ordering in which concepts can be approached in learning and teaching. International Journal of Science and Mathematics Education 2012 # National Science Council, Taiwan 2012