Where do you start?

Questions that may be useful in putting your work into context and helping you to define your project are:

What are you interested in?

It is likely that you have a specific question or topic in mind and this can act as a starting point for engaging in PER. For example, it may be that you have developed some innovative teaching in physics and you are interested in knowing what effect this has had on your students. Or it may be that there are issues that you are particularly interested in, such as student engagement across different demographic groups. Or it may be that you have read about some novel form of assessment and are wondering whether it could be applied to your modules. In some cases, your interest will be very specific (such as evaluating a teaching innovation or introducing a new form of assessment) and this generally helps to define a well-constrained project. In cases where your interests are wider (such as engagement across demographic groups), you may well need to focus on a particular aspect of this issue in order to define a project that you can make progress with. 

What is your motivation for engaging in PER? 

Being consciously aware of your motivations helps you to focus on the outcomes that you want to achieve and become aware of biases in approach. It may be that you want to engage in PER in order to reflect on your own teaching practice or to address an issue that you feel well connected to. In both cases your motivation to carry out the work is likely to be strong, but you may need to pay attention to how your involvement may affect your investigation. It is all too easy only to consider the data or evidence that supports a previously held belief (so-called confirmation bias).  Being conscious of your own views should help you design investigations that take a more critical approach. So for instance, when evaluating a teaching innovation, you might set up control groups or arrange for student interviews to be carried out by a third party.      

Has it been looked at before? 

As in all physics research, good physics education research is based on building on what is already known. In practice this means developing a good understanding of the literature around your topic of interest. One of the challenges of PER is that relevant literature is usually spread over a wide range of educational journals. Spending time carrying out a good literature search before developing your own project will help you not only to understand where your work might develop what is already known, but is also likely to help you design an appropriate methodology for your study. See the resources page and databases such as Web of Science and SCOPUS.   

Who will be interested in your findings?

Having an idea of who might be interested in your findings is useful both for framing your project and planning your outputs (e.g. conference presentations and peer-reviewed papers). So, for instance, you may be interested in how to teach a very technical aspect of physics. In such a case you may find that your key audience is likely to be others who are engaged in teaching the same specialised area. At the other end of the spectrum, you may have conducted work which has implications for teaching and learning in other STEM subjects (or even more widely). In such cases you will be able to identify a broader audience, and for the sake of maximising the impact of your work, you may well want to pay attention to making your work accessible to that audience. 

In a nutshell

Having thought about what your project is about, how it extends knowledge and why you are doing it, you will likely want to plan your investigation. This is likely to involve the following steps, but note that this is not a linear list - you may need to refine your research question in the light of the other steps.

• Define (and refine) your research question 

• Decide on the most appropriate methodology. What data will this generate? How will you analyse the data?

• Plan for outputs. Which meetings/conferences will you attend? Which journals are you aiming to publish in?

• Plan a timeline that includes ethical approval, data management, data acquisition, analysis, reporting and completion.