Resources

Websites

PER-Central: https://www.compadre.org/per/

This is a very useful US website, with a resource collection for physics education researchers. It provides a collection of articles, theses and dissertations, research groups, curricular material, and news and events of interest to the PER Community

Perbites: https://perbites.org/

This website has two types of posts: research summaries and selected readings in PER:

Research summaries: These are short articles summarizing a recent paper regarding physics education research. Most of these will come from Physical Review: Physics Education Research, which is an open access journal, so everyone has access to the entire article.

Selected Readings in PER: These are articles listed in Selected Readings for Physics Education Researchers within and beyond PER, which was created at the 2011 Foundations and Frontiers PER Conference. This list includes many foundational works in physics education and includes examples of research that exemplifies a certain research methodology or research philosophy. Many of these papers are behind paywalls and are copyrighted, limiting what we can include from the article on this blog.

Books and articles

Some foundational reference texts for PER researchers. Some of these are aimed at school physics, some at university level physics.

• Brooks, J. G. and Brooks, M. G. (1999) ‘The constructivist classroom: the courage to be constructivist’, Educational Leadership, 57 (3), 18 – 25.

• Brown, D. E. (1989) ‘Students’ concept of force: the importance of understanding Newton’s third law’, Physics Education, 24 (6), 353 – 358.

• Clement, J. (1982) ‘Students’ preconceptions in Introductory mechanics’, Am. J. Phys., 50 (1), 66 – 71.

• Gamble, R. (1989) ‘Force’, Physics Education, 24 (2), 79 – 82.

• Gunstone, R. F. and White, R. T. (1981) ‘Understanding of gravity’, Science Education, 65 (3), 291 – 299.

• Hestenes, D., Well, M. and Swackhammer, G. (1992) ‘Force Concept Inventory’, Phys. Teach. 30 (3), 374 - 384. (Halloun, I., Hake, R.R. Mosca, E., and Hestenes, D revised the test in 1995.)

• Knight, R. D. (2004) Five easy lessons: Strategies for successful physics teaching, New York: Addison Wesley.

• McDermott, L. C. (1984) ‘Research on conceptual understanding in mechanics’ Physics Today, 37 (7), 24 – 32.

• McDermott, L. C. (1993) ‘Guest comment: “How we teach and how students learn – a mismatch?”’, Am. J. Phys., 60 (4) 295 - 298.

• Redish, E.F. (2003) Teaching Physics with the Physics Suite. New York: John Wiley and Sons Inc.

• Scott, P., Asoko, H. and Leach, J. (2007) 'Student conceptions and conceptual learning in science' in Abell, S. K. and Lederman, N. G., eds., Handbook of research on science education, New York and London: Routledge, 31-56.

• Duit, R., Schecker, H., Hottecke, D. and Niedderer, H. (2014) ‘Teaching Physics’ in Abell, S. K. and Lederman, N. G., eds., Handbook of research on science education, 2nd ed., London and New York: Routledge, 434-456.

• Elby, A. (2010) Rev. PER, 2(1) ‘Getting Started with Research on Epistemologies and Expectations’, http://www.compadre.org/PER/document/ServeFile.cfm?ID=10578&DocID=2071

Resources on theory informing educational research:

• Akpan, B. and Kennedy, T. (2020) Science Education in Theory and Practice: An Introductory Guide to Learning Theory, Springer, NL. 10.1007/978-3-030-43620-9

• Gonsalves, A.J. and Danielsson, A.T. (2020) Physics Education and Gender: Identity as an Analytic Lens for Research, Springer.

Online course

The Open University has a short open-access badged online course on Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in STEM subjects.

https://www.open.edu/openlearn/science-maths-technology/scholarship-teaching-and-learning-stem/content-section-overview