Research with PhysPort

To support PhysPort's mission, we do a lot of research:

• Fundamental research on faculty needs around teaching and assessment, mostly among university physics faculty in the US.

• Applied research on user experience with the PhysPort website.

• Synthesis and fundamental research on effective practices in teaching, learning and assessment, mostly in physics and mostly at the undergraduate level.

The results of PhysPort research have been published in the American Journal of Physics, Physical Review -- Physics Education Research, The Physics Teacher, the Proceedings of the International Conference of the Learning Sciences, and the Physics Education Research Conference Proceedings. 

Our usability research makes the PhysPort website more beautiful and accessible.  PhysPort designs have been copied at PICUP. 

Researchers use PhysPort to do better research, spread the results of their research, or make their research lives easier. 

PhysPort can help researchers with:

• Propagation plans for researchers who develop assessment tools and physics curricula. Are you building a new assessment (or translating an existing one)? Do you develop curricula or teaching methods in physics? PhysPort can help you disseminate your results to physics faculty worldwide. 

• Data management, reduction, and analysis for researchers who collect quantitative data across multiple institutions or in large data sets.  Are you using conceptual surveys with your target population to assess the efficacy of your curricula? Are you developing a new multiple-choice assessment?  PhysPort can help you match pre/post data, develop visualizations about your data, and perform preliminary statistical analyses.

• Ethical data access for researchers interested in quantitative methods in undergraduate physics learning.  Do your research questions require conceptual survey data from a national sample of thousands of undergraduate students in physics?  PhysPort makes anonymized data sets available for researchers with appropriate IRB approvals.  

• Research mentoring and coaching for researchers in physics education and allied fields. Are you new to physics education research? Curious about how to design research projects in education? Worried about how to publish your work?  PhysPort researchers care deeply about helping our field welcome newcomers, do better research, and publish results in compelling ways.  If you're just getting started -- or if you're experienced and want a fresh eye on your work -- we're happy to chat with you about your work. 

PhysPort can help.  For more details, you should email Dr. Eleanor Sayre, PhysPort's research director.

Yes! There are several avenues for this:

• I'm a student at Kansas State University. You can do graduate or undergraduate research with Dr. Sayre.  Contact her for a current list of projects accepting new students.

• I want to join an existing project, and I'm at another institution. You can join a PhysPort research team via the PEER program.  Contact the PEER directors for information about how to get involved and what working groups and field schools are looking for new participants.

• I want to partner with PhysPort on a new collaborative project. We are always interested in new grant ideas.  You should contact Eleanor Sayre to talk about research design and scope.

PhysPort is interested in growing to include other disciplines, improving our internationally-focused resources (including translations as well as resources developed for non-US education systems), and highlighting best practices through Expert Recommendations.   If you want to help with our efforts -- or write grant proposals with us to do that -- please contact Eleanor Sayre.

Great! We love to talk about our research.  You can talk directly to the researcher who contacted you initially, or you can chat with Dr Sayre, PhysPort's research director.   

Yes. Eleanor Sayre regularly gives colloquia about PhysPort (and/or other research in physics education).  If the timing works out, she's happy to visit your institution and give a talk there as well.  If your institution doesn't regularly have colloquia (or if it doesn't ordinarily cover speakers' travel costs), contact her for creative solutions. Institutions outside the US are particularly exciting to visit.

PhysPort is in the midst of a 5-year project to investigate how faculty make changes to their teaching, and how they use PhysPort to inform their decisions.  This research is conducted through remote interviews with physics faculty (e.g. over Zoom), analysis of website use, and feedback from PhysPort's site.   

Preliminary results suggest that faculty are thoughtful about changes to make, use many sources of information to inform their decisions, and consider improving student learning as a multi-faceted and complicated endeavor.  While most faculty are positive about active learning techniques and use them in their classes, they are largely unconcerned with the research basis for those techniques and are unlikely to focus on fidelity of implementation.  These results are mostly absent in the research literature around physics faculty development and uptake of PER-based curricula, suggesting that one cause of faculty hostility towards PER is their perception that PERers are condescending and out-of-touch with their needs.