Focus and Scope
1. Physics Learning: Conceptual Understanding.
Theories, models, and empirical results on conceptual understanding, conceptual change and development of competences; strategies to promote conceptual development.
2. Physics Learning: Contexts, Characteristics and Interactions
Learning environments; teacher-student and student-student interactions; and factors related to and/or affecting learning.
3. Physics Teaching: Characteristics and Strategies
Research-based intervention and its role for curriculum planning; instructional paths and learning outcomes; design of teaching interventions; pedagogical content knowledge; and relations between teaching practices and students’ cognitive, psychomotor, and affective development.
4. Digital Resources for Science Teaching and Learning
Design, evaluation and characterization of resources and environments for teaching/learning physics: ICT and TEL in physics education; online learning environments; simulation and modelling tools; virtual laboratories; self-regulation, reflection and collaboration in digital learning environments.
5. History, Philosophy, and Nature of Science
The implications of nature of science, its history, philosophy, and epistemology for physics education; the significance of models and modelling for physics education; the importance of using metaphors, analogy, visualization, simulations, and animations in physics.
6. Discourse and Argumentation in Physics Education
Discourse analysis; understanding, supporting and promoting use of evidence and argumentation discourse in physics education; scientific practices related to knowledge evaluation and communication; and meaning making in physics classrooms.
7. Scientific Literacy and Socio-scientific Issues
Teaching about scientific literacy; physics and citizenship education; physics and media education; information literacy; debates on socio-scientific issues (SSI); social dimension of science and techno-scientific practices; public engagement in physics, students’ and teachers’ engagement in socio-scientific issues.
8. Evaluation and Assessment of Student Learning and Development
Development, validation and use of standardized tests, achievement tests, and instruments for measuring attitudes, interests, beliefs, self-efficacy, science process skills, conceptual understandings, etc.; authentic assessment, formative assessment, summative assessment; approaches to assessment; monitoring student learning and implications for teaching physics.
9. Pre-service and In-Service Physics Teacher Education
Professional knowledge of teachers; instructional methods in pre-service teacher education; issues related to pre-service teacher education reform; methods, innovation and reform in professional development; evaluation of professional development practices; and action research.
10. Physics textbook analysis
Analysis of physics textbooks in school and university.
