Physics Education Research (PER) practitioners have engaged in substantial curriculum development and dissemination work in recent years. Yet, it appears that this work has had minimal influence on the fundamental teaching practices of the typical physics faculty. To better understand this situation, interviews were conducted with five likely users of physics education research. All reported making changes in their instructional practices and all were influenced, to some extent, by educational research. Yet, none made full use of educational research and most had complaints about their interactions with educational researchers. In this paper we examine how these instructors used educational research in making instructional decisions and identify divergent expectations about how researchers and faculty can work together to improve student learning. Although different instructors emphasized different aspects of this discrepancy between expectations, we believe that they are all related to a single underlying issue: the typical dissemination model is to disseminate curricular innovations and have faculty adopt them with minimal changes, while faculty expect researchers to work with them to incorporate research-based knowledge and materials into their unique instructional situations. Implications and recommendations are discussed.
REFERENCES
Peer instruction is perhaps the most widely used research-based instructional strategy. A widely disseminated survey was able to identify 384 self-described users of peer instruction or similar strategies (see Ref. 4). Respondents were from a “broad array of institution types” throughout the world and “most” used peer instruction to teach physics. However, even if we assume that all 384 users of peer instruction teach tertiary-level physics they would represent just 3.4% of the roughly 11 360 physics faculty employed in two-year and four-year colleges in the United States. Physics faculty data can be found in Refs. 5 and 6.
Redish (see Ref. 13) identifies five features of a traditional physics course in the United States. These have been modified slightly from his original list. (1) It is content oriented. (2) It has of lecture and of problem solving recitation per week. (3) If there is a laboratory, it will be and “cookbook” in nature. (4) The instructor is active during the class session and students are passive. (5) The instructor expects the student to undergo active learning activities outside of the class section, in reading, problem solving, etc., but does not usually enforce these activities.
References to interview statements used throughout this paper include a pseudonym to identify the interviewee and the line number(s) of the statement in the interview transcript.
Of course, many instructors (perhaps the majority) do not change their instruction at all.
