Lillian C. McDermott
65
History
3/15/10
was too embarrassed to leave.
I became increasingly worried as darkness set in.
(Winter
days are very short in Seattle.)
When the meeting finally adjourned, I ran to the car.
By
the time I reached the rehearsal site, the girls were not there.
I remember my sense of
panic and the enormous relief that I felt when, clutching an oboe and a violin, Melanie and
Connie appeared.
I learned later that while Melanie was searching for a telephone to call
me, a man had physically accosted Connie and left her traumatized and in tears.
Today about 10% of the physics faculty at UW are women.
Attitudes have
changed.
Some of my male colleagues are quite assertive about their child-care
responsibilities.
Leaving a faculty meeting early to pick up a child is no longer viewed as
demonstrating a lesser commitment to physics, a situation that benefits all of us.
There is
still a long way to go, however.
The number of women who complete physics Ph.D.
programs remains disproportionately low.
My confidence in being able to succeed in physics owes much to my early
education in environments that were academically as demanding, but not as intellectually
arrogant, as Columbia (or even as UW).
162
Attending a single-sex high school and college
that had many women faculty was also important.
It did not then occur to me that being a
woman might be a disadvantage.
Having a supportive husband was even more critical.
163
XIII.
Conclusion
The long-term goal of the UW Physics Education Group is to produce a coherent,
vertically integrated body of work to help improve learning in physics from the
elementary to the graduate level.
We have demonstrated that research can be a rich
resource for improving the effectiveness of instruction.
Such research is most effectively
conducted in physics departments for several reasons.
The main incentive to improve
student learning in physics is most likely to be found there.
The deep knowledge that is
required to assess student understanding and to identify and address specific intellectual
difficulties is unlikely to exist in other university units.
Access to students as they study
physics is best achieved through faculty who are responsible for the courses, choice of
curriculum, day-to-day instruction, and examinations.
It is difficult for anyone else to
have this access and even harder to influence instructors.
Only research conducted by
162
See Appendix A.
163
See the Acknowledgments.
Lillian C. McDermott
66
History
3/15/10
physicists is likely to be credible to other physicists.
The
same arguments support direct
involvement by physics faculty in K-12 teacher preparation.
Our group was the first at a major American research university in which students
could earn a Ph.D. in physics for research in physics education.
I think that our credibility
has been strengthened by our ongoing participation in research and continuing emphasis
on publication.
We report our results in terms familiar to physicists in refereed journals to
which they have ready access.
(Education publications do not meet these conditions.)
Until fairly recently, we were accustomed to referring to our curriculum as
research-based
.
However, current overuse use of that term is creating a problem.
Almost
every new text today is promoted as research-based.
What seems to be lacking is the
recognition that
research-based
is not equivalent to
research-validated.
Pretesting and
post-testing are crucial.
Just because one is aware of what students cannot do does not
mean that one knows what to do about it.
Unless instructional strategies have been shown
to work reproducibly,
research-based
is not a very strong recommendation.
A higher
standard is needed – one that is based on evidence, not on expectation or opinion.
The current versions of
Physics by Inquiry
and
Tutorials in Introductory Physics
are the result of successive refinement over many iterative cycles.
Unless faculty are
willing to make such a commitment, they should rely on curriculum that has proved
effective.
If they develop their own instructional materials, they should document the
results so that cumulative progress in the teaching of physics becomes possible.
Not intended to be a complete scholarly record, this history of physics education
research presents a particular perspective on PER by a physicist strongly committed to this
field.
164
I interpret my receiving the
1990 AAPT Millikan Lecture Award,
the
2001
AAPT
Oersted Award,
and the
2002
ICPE Medal
as evidence that the field of physics education
research and our group’s role in it have won acceptance by the academic physics
community.
165
We were honored with the
2008 APS Excellence in Physics Education
164
For a broader history of PER, see “ 2
.
A Brief History of PER in the U.S.,” in R.J. Beichner,
An
Introduction to Physics Education Research
(PER Central 2009).
<http://www.per-central.org/document/ServeFile.cfm?ID=8806&DocID=1147>
165
The
Oersted
and
Millikan Awards
are, respectively, the highest and second highest awards given by
AAPT.
The
ICPE
Medal is from the International Commission on Physics Education, which is part of
the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP).
