Teacher Education in Physics

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PhysTEC Preface

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 stu-

dents 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 under-

graduate 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 specifi cally focused on physics teacher educa-

tion. The goal of the Physics Teacher Education Coalition (PhysTEC) 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.

PhysTEC was launched in 2000 as a response to probably the most signifi cant crisis facing physics education and the physics

community in the United States: a pervasive and acute shortage of well prepared high school physics teachers. PhysTEC 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 signifi cant 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 PhysTEC 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 recog-

nize and value the need for increased scholarship and improvement of practice so that as time proceeds, we will see real differ-

ences in how teachers are educated and supported as they prepare the scientifi cally literate citizenry of future generations.

The PhysTEC 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

PhysTEC 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 profes-

sional 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.

Theodore Hodapp

Director of Education and Diversity

American Physical Society

PhysTEC Project Director

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