Taking a scientific approach to physics education

Guided by experimental tests of theory and practice, science has advanced rapidly in the past 500 years. Guided primarily by tradition and dogma, science education has remained largely medieval. Recent research on how people learn, combined with careful experiments in university physics classrooms, is now revealing much more effective ways to teach and evaluate learning than is currently used in most science classes. I will discuss these results and what they tell us about principles of learning and their effective implementation in physics courses and research advising. This research is setting the stage for a new approach to teaching that can provide the relevant and effective science education for all students that is needed for the 21st century. It also reveals that traditional attitudes about learning and the introductory physics curriculum can be inadvertently sustaining systemic discrimination.