RAISING QUALITY OF PHYSICS EDUCATION: CONTRIBUTION OF JBSE OVER THE PAST ISSUES

Abstract

I have worked more than thirty years in physics education (as some of the readers of this journal), many years as a secondary school physics teacher in various curricula (as some of the readers), and more than 20 years at university doing research and preparing future physics teachers (as some or readers). I am also the author of a physics textbook for secondary education, and now I am working on a new one. Naturally, I would like to have the new textbook, like my other outputs, based on the current state of knowledge and well-developed and well-applied theories behind physics education. And here is the seed of the question - how does our journal contribute to raising the quality of our outputs – in my case, increasing the quality of physics education? I first look at the goals of physics education. Here, I use the most straightforward taxonomy of goals presented in (Demkanin 2013): goals related to attitudes of society to science, goals related to methods of science, and goals related to particular knowledge. The last one I split into two sub-goals – knowledge selected to develop methods and attitudes and knowledge selected to raise the quality of living and general scientific culture. Of course, the goals we can reach by means – by the methods of education – methods of teaching and learning. So, let's look at a few previous issues of JBSE and at the contributions having the potential to raise the quality of physics education. I have mentioned only some of the contributions I will probably use in the next few years. I tried to focus on physics education, not explicit chemistry or biology education, even if some of such articles could be fully relevant to my work.