Description of the Program

Introduction

Physics and Astronomy Education Research (PAER) is a relatively new field in physics and astronomy departments, having started about twenty years ago. The Rutgers Physics and Astronomy Department has a long history of course reform. However, somewhat less work has been done in research about learning.

Goals

By incorporating education research into the physics department the Rutgers PAER group aims to

• Perform basic research about the learning and teaching of physics.
• Help in the preparation of future teachers.
• Develop curriculum materials and learning strategies based on research about learning.
• Incorporate new curriculum materials and strategies into new and established courses.

This research combines with that from other PAER groups to form a national resource to accomplish our common purposes.

The Rutgers PAER group, although situated in the Physics Department, is interdisciplinary in nature, drawing expertise from both the Physics Department and the Graduate School of Education. There is a constant exchange of ideas and innovation between the two and the resulting research is fed into (currently) two restructured physics courses in the Physics Department. It is envisioned that this exchange will have a positive effect on both science education graduate students and physics graduate students.

• Physics graduate students teach in restructured courses where the physics education research is currently being implemented and refined. It is hoped that this contact with innovative instructional methods and education research will positively affect their future careers as both researchers and college physics teachers.
• In addition, some graduate students in science education become TA’s in the physics department as part of their training. It is hoped that this will increase their content knowledge and positively affect their own teaching after they graduate. Their high school students in turn benefit from both their innovative teaching techniques and their stronger content knowledge. This is envisioned to ultimately produce stronger STEM students coming into the universities.

Outcomes of the Program

Rutgers now has a PAER research effort that includes three graduate students, a prospective post-doc, and several faculty and staff. The group has two NSF grants ($900,000 total) that helps support this work and is preparing a third large proposal with the Chemistry Department and the Graduate School of Education concerning the preparation of future high school teachers.

The group is currently conducting research in:
• Role of representations in learning and problem solving.
• Integration of video technology and simulation into physics instruction.
• Helping students develop science process abilities. In particular, evaluation as an important science process ability.
• Teaching and learning of Quantum Mechanics, particularly the role of language in how expert physicists present ideas and how students interact with that language.
• The structural knowledge and components of electrodynamics.

Implementation

Challenges

Probably the key challenge for our program is to convey the legitimacy of our research to the physics faculty and graduate students. Too often the PAER group is seen exclusively as a teaching resource, responsible for developing new curriculum materials or lab demonstrations, and nothing else. Physics education research as a research field involves the study of complex systems and emergent phenomena. These types of phenomena are not easily reducible to a simple set of equations or neat, unambiguous statistics. As a result, a divide in research techniques and research language emerges between the physics community and the PAER community. In the worst case scenario, the physics community and the PAER group could become unable to communicate on any level. Our key challenge is therefore to find novel ways of incorporating our research discourse into the mainstream discourse of physics research and to find ways of communicating our ideas effectively to non-experts.