Using Physics Education Research to Understand and Improve the Learning Experience of All Students

In the last fifty years, Physics Education Research (PER) has provided significant insights into what students learn in university courses (and the extent to which they fail to learn) and how we can improve student understanding. Careful studies on a variety of physics topics have documented the fine structure of student ideas while research-validated curricula have helped to deepen conceptual understanding, hone quantitative problem solving, and make physics lab experiences more worthwhile, thereby promoting deeper learning for a greater fraction of students in both introductory and upper division physics courses. And yet, considerable challenges that threaten the systemic health of the whole physics enterprise remain. To make matters worse, recent changes in the federal legal and funding landscapes are antithetical to longstanding researcher efforts to make physics accessible to all students. In this talk, specific examples will be given to illustrate results from research in cognitive and non-cognitive aspects of physics learning, as well as unanswered PER questions and possible future directions for research.