Science education is the teaching and learning of science to school children, college students, or adults within the general public. The field of science education includes work in science content, science process, some social science, and some teaching pedagogy. The standards for science education provide expectations for the development of understanding for students through the entire course of their K-12 education and beyond. The traditional subjects included in the standards are physical, life, earth, space, and human sciences.
National Science Digital Library (NSDL) of the United States is an open-access online digital library and collaborative network of disciplinary and grade-level focused education providers operated by the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education. NSDL's mission is to provide quality digital learning collections to the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education community, both formal and informal, institutional and individual. NSDL's collections are refined by a network of STEM educational and disciplinary professionals. Their work is based on user data, disciplinary knowledge, and participation in the evolution of digital resources as major elements of effective STEM learning.
Carl Edwin Wieman is an American physicist and educationist at Stanford University, and currently the A. D. White Professor at Large at Cornell University. In 1995, while at the University of Colorado Boulder, he and Eric Allin Cornell produced the first true Bose–Einstein condensate (BEC) and, in 2001, they and Wolfgang Ketterle were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics. Wieman currently holds a joint appointment as Professor of Physics and Professor in the Stanford Graduate School of Education, as well as the DRC Professor in the Stanford University School of Engineering. In 2020, Wieman was awarded the Yidan Prize in Education Research for "his contribution in developing new techniques and tools in STEM education".
The University of Colorado Boulder is a public research university in Boulder, Colorado, United States. Founded in 1876, five months before Colorado became a state, it is the flagship university of the University of Colorado system. CU Boulder is a member of the Association of American Universities and is classified among R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity.
Frank Friedman Oppenheimer was an American particle physicist, cattle rancher, professor of physics at the University of Colorado, and the founder of the Exploratorium in San Francisco.
A concept inventory is a criterion-referenced test designed to help determine whether a student has an accurate working knowledge of a specific set of concepts. Historically, concept inventories have been in the form of multiple-choice tests in order to aid interpretability and facilitate administration in large classes. Unlike a typical, teacher-authored multiple-choice test, questions and response choices on concept inventories are the subject of extensive research. The aims of the research include ascertaining (a) the range of what individuals think a particular question is asking and (b) the most common responses to the questions. Concept inventories are evaluated to ensure test reliability and validity. In its final form, each question includes one correct answer and several distractors.
The Space Science Institute (SSI) in Boulder, Colorado, is a nonprofit, public-benefit corporation formed in 1992. Its purpose is to create and maintain an environment where scientific research and education programs can flourish in an integrated fashion. SSI is among the four non-profit institutes in the US cited in a 2007 report by Nature, including Southwest Research Institute, Planetary Science Institute, and Eureka Scientific, which manage federal grants for non-tenure-track astronomers.
John Gordon King (1925–2014) was an English-born American physicist who was the Francis Friedman Professor of Physics (emeritus) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the former director of MIT’s Molecular Beam Laboratory, and the former associate director of MIT’s Research Laboratory of Electronics.
MERLOT is an online repository and international consortium of institutions of higher education, industry partners, professional organizations, and individuals. MERLOT partners and members are devoted to identifying, peer reviewing, organizing, and making available existing online learning resources in a range of academic disciplines for use by higher education faculty and students.
The Concord Consortium was founded in 1994 as an educational research and development organization to create large-scale improvements in K-14 teaching and learning through technology.
The Richtmyer Memorial Award is an award for physics education, named for physicist Floyd K. Richtmyer and given annually by the American Association of Physics Teachers. Its recipients include over 15 Nobel Prize winners.
Christopher Roy Monroe is an American physicist and engineer in the areas of atomic, molecular, and optical physics and quantum information science, especially quantum computing. He directs one of the leading research and development efforts in ion trap quantum computing. Monroe is the Gilhuly Family Presidential Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Physics at Duke University and is College Park Professor of Physics at the University of Maryland and Fellow of the Joint Quantum Institute and Joint Center for Quantum Computer Science. He is also co-founder of IonQ, Inc.
Physics education research (PER) is a form of discipline-based education research specifically related to the study of the teaching and learning of physics, often with the aim of improving the effectiveness of student learning. PER draws from other disciplines, such as sociology, cognitive science, education and linguistics, and complements them by reflecting the disciplinary knowledge and practices of physics. Approximately eighty-five institutions in the United States conduct research in science and physics education.
Chandralekha Singh is an Indian-American physicist who is a professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Pittsburgh and the Founding Director of the Discipline-Based Science Education Research Center.
Noah David Finkelstein is a professor of physics at the University of Colorado Boulder. He is a founding co-director of the Colorado Center for STEM Learning, a President’s Teaching Scholar, and the inaugural Timmerhaus Teaching Ambassador. His research focuses on physics education and on developing models of context, the scope of which involves students, departments, and institutional scales of transformation. In 2010, Finkelstein testified to the United States House Committee on Science, Space and Technology on how to strengthen undergraduate and postgraduate STEM education.
Steven J. Pollock is an American professor of physics and a President's Teaching Scholar at the University of Colorado Boulder, where he has taught since 1993. His specialisations are in physics education research and in nuclear theory. He is the 2013 U.S. Professor of the Year.
Heather Lewandowski is a professor of physics at the University of Colorado Boulder. She looks to understand the quantum mechanical processes in making chemical bonds. She uses time-varying inhomogeneous electric fields to achieve supersonic cooling. She also studies how students learn experimental skills in instructional physics labs and help to improve student learning in these environments. She is a Fellow of the American Physical Society.
Wendy K. Adams is an American physics educator. She is known for her work on interactive educational simulations of physics including the PhET Interactive Simulations project, on the effectiveness of peer discussions on conceptual understanding of physics, on measurement of student beliefs about physical concepts, on public beliefs about what it is like to be a physics teacher, and on other aspects of physics education. She is a research professor of physics in the Colorado School of Mines. and the Executive Director of Get the Facts Out a national multi-society effort to repair the reputation of the teaching profession.
Ximena Cid is a Chicana and Indigenous American physicist; physics educator and physics education researcher; and advocate for increasing diversity and supporting minority students in STEM and physics. She is currently associate professor and past chair of the physics department at California State University Dominguez Hills. She is recognized as the first Latina student, as well as the first Indigenous student, to earn a PhD in physics from the University of Texas at Arlington. She is also recognized as likely the first Indigenous person to chair a physics department in the country. One of her research specialties is 3-D simulations to support the comprehension of systems such as gravitational fields, electric fields and magnetic fields.
Sarah Busby (Sam) McKagan is an American physics educator who directs several online portals for education resources in physics and related subjects. These include PhysPort and the Living Physics Portal of the American Association of Physics Teachers, aimed at physics and physics for the life sciences, respectively, and Effective Practices for Physics Programs (EP3), a project of the American Physical Society.
