Abstract
Is physics education research based on a representative sample of students? To answer this question we skimmed physics education research papers from three journals for the years 1970 - 2015 looking for the number of research subjects, the course the subjects were enrolled in, and the institution where the research was conducted. We then compared the demographics of our research population to those of all students taking physics in the United States. Our results suggest that research subjects as a whole are better prepared mathematically and are less diverse than the overall physics student population.
Highlights
In the past half-century, physics education researchers have probed student thinking, affect and identity, developed curricula and tools for measuring progress, and created theoretical models
Result 1: physics education research (PER) in the U.S pays scant attention to high school physics During the 2012–2013 school year, 1.38 million students were enrolled in physics courses in the U.S in both public and private high schools [12]. [This segment of the overall physics student population has grown faster than introductory courses in colleges and universities, as shown in Fig. 1(a)] In comparison, there were about 0.5 million students enrolled in introductory physics courses in colleges and universities
Using a proportional distribution of expected SAT Math scores as we did in our description of result 3, we find that about 58% of the research sample of upper-level physics students can be expected to have scores above 600, compared to about 25% expected of students at all schools
Summary
In the past half-century, physics education researchers have probed student thinking, affect and identity, developed curricula and tools for measuring progress, and created theoretical models. The tremendous success of this collective endeavor, based on data collected from hundreds of thousands of students, has resulted in a greater expectation within and beyond the physics community that educational progress should be solidly grounded in evidence-based scientific investigation. The successes of physics education research (PER) have been achieved without an explicit accounting of the match between our research population and the population of students that we intend to benefit. The intent of this paper is to highlight, and to attempt to quantify, the disparities that exist between the level of preparation and the background of the general population of students taking introductory physics in the United States (or, for some comparisons, students taking physics at American universities and colleges) and the student population reported on in the physics education research literature
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