Education research is our focus
Welcome to PER-Central, a resource collection for physics education researchers. Here you may find articles, theses and dissertations, research groups, curricular material, and news and events of interest to the PER Community. Learn more about PER-Central.
PER Literature
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- Basic Research
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By Topic:
Astronomy, Classical Mechanics, Electricity & Magnetism, Fluid Mechanics, General Physics, Mathematical Tools, Modern Physics, Optics, Oscillations & Waves, Other Sciences, Quantum Physics, Relativity, Thermo & Stat Mech
Reviews in PER
Over the past two decades, the PER community has developed a number of effective instructional strategies for calculus-based university physics classes.
This review article helps to bring a set of those results to the instructional community:
The Student-Centered Activities for Large Enrollment Undergraduate Programs (SCALE-UP) project
by R. J. Beichner, J. M. Saul, D. S. Abbott, J. J. Morse, D. L. Deardorff, R. J. Allain, S. W. Bonham, M. H. Dancy, and J. S. Risley.
Find more articles that help to bridge research and practice in Volume 1 of Reviews in PER.
Community Resources
PER Programs
Browse the different PER groups and their descriptions on the PER Program Map.
For the Classroom
PhysPort
The PhysPort helps physics educators apply PER results, assessments, and the teaching methods based on these results.
Find more PER-based Curricular Materials: Course Packages | Student Activities | Pedagogy Guides
Research Instruments
Representational Variant of the Force Concept Inventory (R-FCI)
The R-FCI, developed by Nieminen, Savinainen, and Viiri, is designed to investigate students' ability to interpret multiple representations consistently in the context of four force concepts: Newton's first, second, and third laws, and gravitation. It is based on nine FCI items that have been redesigned using various representations (such as motion map, vectorial, and graphical).
