Nearly 40% of high school physics teachers teach mostly other subjects. About the same percentage say they are not adequately prepared in some areas. Those and other findings come from a 2012–13 survey conducted by the Statistical Research Center of the American Institute of Physics, which asked 27 000 high school physics teachers from across the US—more than a third of them women—how well prepared they felt for the job.
Teachers were asked to rate themselves as “not adequately,” “adequately,” or “very adequately” prepared in seven categories: basic physics, other science, application of physics to everyday experience, use of demonstrations, instructional laboratory design, use of computers in physics instruction and labs, and recent developments in physics.
In several categories, a higher proportion of men than women say they are at least adequately prepared. The largest gender gap was in how prepared teachers felt they are to teach recent developments in...
