Physics Education Research (PER) is an area of physics unbeknown to most physicists in Norway. PER is primarily concerned with improving physics teaching at the university level, and research groups in PER are thus situated in Physics Departments with physicists as its practitioners. At the beginning of my talk, I will give a brief introduction to PER.
The majority of my talk will focus on my PhD project, carried out in the School of Physics at the University of Sydney, Australia. My goal was to improve first year physics education by designing a teaching environment and strategy based on knowledge of how the human brain learns. Four semester-long courses and 700 students were involved. The project was a success. Students from all courses overwhelmingly preferred the intervention, and in the course designed for students with little or no prior knowledge of physics, the fail rate was reduced by 50%. Based on the positive results, the School of Physics has for five years now implemented the new teaching environment into two of their first year courses.
Since August 2012, I have been teaching physics to science teacher education students using PER developed teaching methods, treating it as a pilot study in the Norwegian context. To conclude my talk, I will discuss some of the methods I have been using along with the preliminary results from this pilot study.