About

The goal of PERbites is extend the goals of Astrobites and the other ScienceBites sites to the physics education community. We want to make the results of physics education research meaningful and accessible to all.

Physics education is unique in that many members coming to the discipline have been trained as physicists rather than as education researchers and may not be familiar with the field’s terminology or how education research is done. Additionally, many of the physics instructors who are interested in incorporating physics education research into their classroom conduct research in other areas of physics or may not do research at all. Therefore, we believe there should be a medium to connect those who conduct the research with those who will benefit from it most. This site serves as a realization of that goal.

Here, we hope to avoid commons barriers encountered when reading scientific papers in an unfamiliar discipline and instead, provide short, clear descriptions of what’s happening in our field. We believe that when the barriers to participation are removed, everyone benefits. Additionally, we try to highlight open access research articles so that everyone is able to view the original paper for free. Currently, we post a new article every month, typically on Wednesday or Thursday.

Types of Articles

Currently, there are two types of posts, research summaries and selected readings in PER.

  • Research summaries: These are short articles summarizing a recent paper regarding physics education research. Most of these will come from Physical Review: Physics Education Research, which is an open access journal, so everyone has access to the entire article.
  • Selected Readings in PER: These are articles listed in Selected Readings for Physics Education Researchers within and beyond PER, which was created at the 2011 Foundations and Frontiers PER Conference. This list includes many foundational works in physics education and includes examples of research that exemplifies a certain research methodology or research philosophy. Many of these papers are behind paywalls and are copyrighted, limiting what we can include from the article on this blog.

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Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of any institutions the author(s) may be associated with or PERbites. PERbites is not associated with Physical Review: Physics Education Research or any of the other journals whose articles may be featured on this site.

PERbites is technical support and hosting is provided by the American Astronomical Society (AAS). However, AAS is not responsible for the content that appears on this site.