Is Physics Education Research (PER), Physics, Education or Both?

In an editorial published this year to mark the 10th anniversary of the journal Physical Review, Special Topics, Physics Education Review, Robert Beichner, wrote:


Physics Education Research (PER) is a well-established subfield of physics…..He went on to say:

'Prior to the 1990s, many (or perhaps most) physicists did not put much credence in the slowly growing body of research on the teaching and learning of their subject [1]. ' 


However, this view is not one that is common in the UK. EPSRC, the main funding body in the UK for science and engineering do not have a clear route of funding for PER. And although The Royal Society have funded maths and physics education fellowships in the past,  more recently they responded to an application for funding to investigate how physics students learn mathematics with:

'The techniques you propose to use in your research are more common to education and learning research,' and that ' panel members with expertise in natural scientific method would not be able to give your proposal a fair or informed assessment.'

Perhaps one issue is the range of different types of research that all fall under the PER banner. Here is my suggested classification -comments and suggestions welcome!

1) Primarily physics-basedThese papers focus on students' understanding of a particular area of physics. They may not provide results that are easy to generalise to other areas of physics, or other sciences, nor do they lead to further understanding of learning in general. In this example researchers focus on students understanding of the Boltzmann factor and on the effects of an instructional intervention to improve understanding. This type of research requires an indepth knowledge of physics (as well as skills in appropriate research methods), but not necessarily of education theory.


Example: Student understanding of the Boltzmann factor

2) Joint Physics/Education
These papers use, or extend, theoretical educational ideas to understand how physics students learn physics. The research questions are often ones that come about because of the particular challenges faced in learning physics (due to the nature of the material being taught or to the teaching settings/methods) that would not be thought of in studying other subjects,  but the results are likely to be applicable to learning in others subjects and contexts. This type of research needs a combination of indepth physics knowledge and knowledge of educational theory.

For example this paper

Do experts and novices direct attention differently in examining physics diagrams? A study of change detection using the flicker technique

examines whether physics undergraduate (novices) and physics graduate students (experts) noticed small changes in diagrams of physics phenomena. Although the study examines physics specific contexts, the findings have implications for the difference between novices and experts in other domains.



3) Education dominated

In this type of research the focus is on general areas of learning or cognitive science from an education perspective, applied to physics students. Examples include assessing physics students' study methods, their views on using clickers, or their beliefs about the nature of science. Research questions are not specific to physics students but are generated through a need to understand a particular aspect of learning.  This type of research produces results that are the most likely to be generalisable to other subject areas including non-science subjects.  The research can be successfully carried out by educationalists who have little or no knowledge of physics so long as they collaborate with physicists.

Example: Gender differences in introductory undergraduate physics performance: University physics versus college physics in the USA

Ofcourse in reality many research projects will have components of more than one area.

Is this a helpful way to think about PER, or other discipline based research?

Is Physics Education Research (PER), Physics, Education or Both? by Anna Wood is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.