How to do Physics Education Research

Abstract

The long time complaint of physics professors is that the students have serious difficulty in learning physics. Extensive research in Physics Education Research (PER) has shown that many students are not learning physics. Many students come into the physics class or lab with serious misconceptions about basic concepts in physics. From 15−19 years of lived experience and the common every-day use of language they think in Aristotelian physics.
In the last 20 years the field of Physics Education Research has developed among university physics departments to address the problems. The University of Washington (state) awarded the first PhD in Physics Education in 1979.
The following are suggestions on how to do PER:

• Keep a personal journal, recording essentials of your reading and work, with date and signature for each day. It is considered a legal document.
• Do extensive reading in the journals. Visit web-sites [1] of active PER groups. Read relevant materials in educational statistics and research.
• Be aware that education and statistics have a different jargon from physics. There are now about 18 well-developed instruments that cover many parts of introductory physics and are available via the web. They went through extensive development work and the developers welcome your use and reporting of your results to them. 

At the present time, I suggest testing validity and reliability of existing instruments here in the Philippines. What works in another country may not work here especially because of cultural and language differences. Some instruments may have to be translated into local languages and tested for validity and reliability.
Then replicate existing research and compare your results with the original. You can develop local ``benchmarks'' that can later be used to evaluate any educational changes here.