Forum on Education of the American Physical Society
Fall 2007 Newsletter

PER Central

H. Vincent Kuo

PER-CENTRAL - The Physics Education Research – Community Enhancing Network for Teaching, Research and Learning (http://per-central.org) is a ComPADRE collection designed specifically to serve as an informational touch-point and online community for “producers” and “consumers” of physics education research (PER). The collection contains information about and links to a wide range of materials and resources for the use of people conducting research on the teaching and learning of physics. Some of these materials are also useful to teachers and administrators interested in applying the findings of physics education research.

Collection Features

The resources in the collection are currently sorted in the following categories: News and Events, Research Work, Groups and People, Curriculum, and Bibliography.

• News and Events contains information on upcoming local and national PER events as well as news that is related to PER.
• Research Work contains links to PER Dissertations. Many of these dissertations are archived in the ComPADRE repository with the agreement of the authors and are available free of charge.
• Groups and People provides a listing of the PER groups and people around the country and world (see Figure 1). The listing is further divided by states, and each link will take you to a site that contains information about that particular research group or person. Each of these sites is maintained by an individual from that research group, and links exist to take you to the specific group site if it exists.
• Curriculum contains PER resources for use in research and the classroom, and links to research-based curricular material.
• Bibliography is a searchable database of PER references. Articles without use restrictions are linked to directly. For articles that have costs associated with them, the link will provide information on how to access copies. In the “details” page of each reference there is a way for any registered user to post a comment about its usefulness. These comments can be seen by any one accessing that reference.

Figure 1: Google Map of PER Groups and People

There is now a special series in the collection called Reviews in Physics Education Research. In the review articles published in this series, researchers help bridge research and practice, bringing the results of extended, multi-year research and development projects to the instructional community. The first volume is on research-based reform of university physics. Over the past two decades, the PER community has not only learned a great deal about how students learn and do not learn in the calculus-based (university) physics class, it has developed a number of effective instructional environments. The first issue contains four invited review articles where the developers of some of these curricula present an overview of their work. Additional editions are under development.

The collection also includes a direct link to the new digital Physical Review Journal devoted entirely to Physics Education Research: PRST-PER. This journal is free of charge, and contains peer-reviewed articles on the latest research results in physics education.

Collection Tools

A user can search and browse the reference database without joining PER-CENTRAL. However, membership – which is free – does have its benefits. Members of PER-CENTRAL have additional tools that improve their use of the site. These include individual search preferences, a personal filing cabinet to store resources found to be useful, access to discussion forums with other community members, the facility to create a personal group with restricted membership, and the ability to recommend resources for inclusion in the database.

Becoming a member of PER-CENTRAL is straightforward; click on the “create an account” link in the navigation bar – located on the left-hand side of the PER-CENTRAL site – and answer a few simple questions. Once a member, a user can begin to enjoy the following tools:

• Search Preferences: Searches can be specialized by Language, Results per Page, Education Level, User Type, and Resource Type.
• Filing Cabinet: this provides a user with his or her own personal storage system to create folders, name them, and then 'bookmark' items for later perusal. Folders and bookmarks will exist across all of the ComPADRE collections. To bookmark an item, find it using the search or browse functions, and check the box next to the item. At the top of the search page, choose the folder in which to save the selection and click “File”. In addition, saved items can be viewed in multiple citation formats or exported to many popular reference editors. A personal synopsis can be added to each reference in the filing cabinet as a reminder for the future. The folders and the contents within a filing cabinet are a user’s personal collection, and he or she alone has access to them. A user can, however, choose to “share” any part of the filing cabinet with any other user in the ComPADRE system.
• Discussion Forums: all members can read and post on any of the public discussion forums. All members can also create new forums on topics of their interest. The postings on these forums are monitored by the editors of the collection, and are open to all PER-CENTRAL members. If a user would like to have a closed forum that restricts general access, he or she can request a group be created under the Groups and People category. Each group site has built-in discussion tools and the editors can grant administrative access to a specific forum with which a user can privately invite certain members to join.
• Submit Resources: Any member can suggest a reference or a resource that does not already exist in the database via the “Submit Resources” link.

Things to come

Since the primary goal of the collection is to serve the users, we are currently in discussion with several members of the PER community on how to expand the collection to meet more of the community’s needs. Here are just a couple of the features that will be implemented in the near future:

• Special topics of discussion: this can take the form of blogs or wikis, and will focus on topics such as General Research Methodology, Development of Assessment Tools, How to Conduct Interviews, Data Analysis, etc… We are looking for interested parties to serve as Topical Editors for these threads, as well as suggestions on other topics of interest.
• Applied PER: this new area inside the collection will contain annotated curricular material, more general practical uses of the findings from physics education research, and cross references with the relevant research articles. This area of the collection will become a detailed users’ guide to PER.

The usefulness of this collection depends entirely on the participation of its users. The more comments, suggestions, and opinions we get, the better the collection becomes. I cordially invite you to access the site (http://per-central.org) and play around. If you find the collection to be beneficial, please join our community, and bring your friends and colleagues. Let me know how we can expand the collection to better serve your needs.

H. Vince Kuo is a lecturer with the Physics Department at Colorado School  of Mines. He received his Ph.D. in Education at the University of Minnesota in 2004. Dr. Kuo’s area of expertise is physics education research, with a concentration in problem solving in introductory calculus-based physics. He has helped develop several laboratory activities at UMN, and helped in the development of student activities that complemented the Matter and Interactions curriculum at  NCSU in the SCALE-UP environment. As the editor for the PER-CENTRAL, Dr. Kuo is working to establish an electronic home base for the  Physics Education Research community.