No one would have any trouble discerning the differences between how experimental physics was done a hundred years ago and how it is done today. Nor has physics itself stood still, with knowledge building with each experiment. Now step into a physics classroom of a century ago and one today and compare the two environments.
The contrast is less stunning, to say the least. One could chalk it up to the idea that we had it pretty much perfect back then – so why change?
Unfortunately, the evidence doesn’t support this idea; recently published results have demonstrated that there are, in fact, much better ways to educate students that improve not only their understanding of physics, but also their attitudes toward the discipline and about the nature of science.
Although physics education research (PER) is a comparatively new fi eld, with only a few hundred peer-reviewed publications to date, it is beginning to change the scene you encounter in many classrooms today.
A large fraction of PER has focused on undergraduate education and, in particular, on the introductory physics curriculum. Prior to the solicitation of papers for publication of this volume, very little research had been published in the United States that was specifically focused on physics teacher education.
The goal of the Physics Teacher Education Coalition (Phys TEC) in publishing this collection is to help inspire a broadening of the scholarship that PER is already bringing to undergraduate physics to include more work in the area of teacher education.
Integrated in this goal is the desire to bring recognition to faculty members who devote a portion of their professional lives to educating teachers, and to understanding how best to improve the teacher education processes that exist in universities today.
Our hope is to help build for teacher education the type of foundation enjoyed in experimental physics today that distinguishes it so readily from the physics of a century ago. Phys TEC was launched in 2000 as a response to probably the most significant crisis facing physics education and the physics community in the United States: a pervasive and acute shortage of well-prepared high school physics teachers.
Phys TEC was sponsored initially by the American Physical Society (APS), American Association of Physics Teachers, and American Institute of Physics, and funded by the National Science Foundation and individual and corporate donations to the APS’s Campaign for the 21st Century.
Today, more than a decade later, the project has demonstrated significant success in advancing model teacher education efforts at more than twenty institutions nationwide.
This book was conceived in 2005 as one of several related efforts of the Phys TEC project to build recognition of, and to inspire and disseminate scholarship centered on teacher education efforts.
The project hopes that the community will continue to recognize and value the need for increased scholarship and improvement of practice so that as time proceeds, we will see real differences in how teachers are educated and supported as they prepare the scientifically literate citizenry of future generations.
The Phys TEC project would like to publicly thank this work’s editor Professor David Meltzer, his associate editor Professor Peter Schaffer, and the book’s Editorial Board for their hard work and diligence in pursuing the details of this volume and in establishing and maintaining the high standards that scholarship of this type must embody to provide appropriate recognition within the community.
We would also like to thank the National Science Foundation and numerous private donors for supporting Phys TEC and, consequently, this effort.
Finally, we acknowledge the tremendous effort by the many professionals in the fi eld who spend a good fraction of their professional life educating future teachers.
Their devotion to educating teachers and to building the scholarship of teacher education,
while often neither recognized nor appropriately rewarded, is an inspiration to us all. Thank you
