C14. Commission on Physics Education

Report to the IUPAP Council and Commission Chair Meeting
Mexico
September 28-29, 2001

Mandate of the commission

The commissions' mandate is to promote the exchange of information and views among the members of the international community of physics in the general field of Physics Education. In the past it targeted high school and university physics teachers, trying to give help especially to teachers in developing countries.

Activities in 2000/2001

1. The commission continued with policy of distributing information in the field of physics education:

ICPE Newsletter: published twice a year, distributed more and more as an email
attachment to more than 2000 addresses.

The book "Connecting Research in Physics Education with Teacher Education", first published in 1998 and since then distributed very widely, has been translated into French and, like the English edition, is available on the web for free downloading. A Spanish translation should be ready in October. Both translations were sponsored by UNESCO.

2. The commission held its annual meeting on Aug. 11-12, 2001 in Seoul, Korea, just preceding the "International Conference on Physics Education in Cultural Contexts" (ICPEC), one of the two ICPE approved conferences this year.

The commission decided to set up a network of links between groups worldwide dedicated to physics or science education. ICPE would like to serve as an Information clearing house collecting and redistributing the information between those groups in order to increase the cooperation between them. In this role ICPE could also give support to capacity building in physics education, especially in developing countries.

ICPE is aware of changes coming up in various fields that are in the commissions' concern:

Changes in Physics as a subject
Changes in interest of students for studying physics
Changes in the goal of Physics Education
Changes in the research base for Science Education

ICPE started to discuss long-term priorities in this field (s. attached draft).

September 2001

Juergen Sahm
(Chair of C14)