A framework for effective physics education applied to secondary and university physics courses

Physics education is in trouble. The number of physics majors has been decreasing in recent years, even as the number of college students has grown. Physics is seen as a difficult subject which only a select few can understand. Introductory physics classes have been very successful at removing students from the science pipeline. A relatively new specialty in physics departments, Physics Education Research, or PER, has developed in part to address the problem of improving introductory physics. A key part of nearly every introductory physics class is the laboratory, so looking at lab closely could provide insight into how students experience introductory physics. This study proposes a framework for understanding introductory physics education in high school and college, and applies that framework to three courses studied through observation, interview and document analysis.;Generally, the framework proposes that physics programs define a set of roles for teachers, students, and groups to follow in the process of physics education. The roles are defined through explicit and implicit expectations for the behavior of teachers and students in the classroom. The interactions among teachers, students and groups are central to the process of teaching and learning physics. Different programs encourage different kinds of interactions between the constituents, which is part of what makes some programs more effective than others. Any or all of the participants may accept or reject the role the program sets for them, and that also determines how effective the program can be.;The framework does not address the temporal variation in the interactions within each setting, so an additional layer addressing the dramatic aspects of physics courses is also part of the dissertation. Students remembered specific, dramatic events from their physics classes, not the regular repetition of lab procedures, and this provides teachers with an opportunity to connect real physics knowledge to dramatic demonstrations or class events.