European Physical Society Physics Education Division
Since 2000, the European Physical Society’s Physics Education Division has been contributing to awareness of the relevance of physics in everyday culture, to interaction amongst schools and universities and to a better quality of physics teaching at all levels.
The Physics Education Division achieves this by addressing and promoting physics, the continued education of teachers, large scale educational changes – such as the Bologna process – and successful new teaching methods, taking into account differences and similarities in the European education systems.
Another important mission of the division is to stimulate successful teaching practices by giving a bi-annual prize, the EPS Physics Education Division Award, for achievements in secondary school level physics teaching.
The current Physics Education Division board consists of eight members, and is presently chaired by Robert Lambourne, of the Open University, England. Lambourne, who was recently nominated chairperson of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics‘s International Commission on Physics Education, will be leaving early 2012.
Since 2008, the More Understanding with Simple Experiments [MUSE] project has offered teachers and researchers a set of nine research-based, free, downloadable materials – characterised by added value in education. For example:
- easy-to-assemble experiments, covering different cognitive levels, using readily available materials;
- identification and analysis of diverse viewpoints;
- learning strategies and environments promoting active learning;
- addressing naïve reasoning, based on common-sense and an understanding of physics;
- including/building on work from Physics Education Research;
- communicating and formalising concepts;
- uncovering teaching practices which result in misleading argumentation.
Gorazd Planinsic, of the physics department in Ljubljana, Slovenia, will be the next chairperson of the Physics Education Division. Planinsic will continue to improve on, and expand, the above work by stimulating the participation of all the division’s members, fostering connections with other European Physical Society divisions and increasing the number of members active in the MUSE project.
