University of Nebraska, Lincoln
Members
- Fuller, Robert
The University of Nebraska - Lincoln Research in Physics Education Group (RPEG) was started in 1973 by a visit to UNL from Robert Kaplus. The early years of the program focused on the development of reasoning ala Piaget and Karplus and lead to the creation of a multidisciplinary freshmen program at UNL, the ADAPT program.
During the 1970s and 80s, graduate students working in the program were required to seek a Ph.D. in science education. There were two such Ph.D.s, Thomas C. Campbell and Scott Stevens.
In 1989, the Department of Physics and Astronomy of UNL voted to permit Ph.D.s within the department in physics education research. The first person to obtain a Ph.D. after that was Weija Zhang (Weijia_Zhang@Dell.com) in 1996. The program obtained a NSF Graduate Research Traineeship grant in 1991, and the program produced three Ph.D.s, Brian Adrian (badrian@phys.ksu.edu) in 1997, Rebecca Lindell (rlindel@siue.edu) in 2001, and Thomas Thaden-Koch (ttkoch@physics.umn.edu) in 2003, and three M.S. degrees, Christopher Moore (cmoore@src.wisc.edu) in 1992, and Renee Lathrop (lathrop@sunydutchess.edu) and Geoffrey Brooks in 2002. Both Vicki Plano Clark (vpc@unlserve.unl.ed) and Cecilia A. Hernandez-Hall (HernanC@arc.losrios.edu) also made significant contributions to the work of the group.
The program was closed in June, 2005. The RPEG website is still maintained by the department at http://physics.unl.edu/~rpeg/rpeg.html
This information was submitted by Robert G. Fuller, Professor Emeritus, in May 2006.
