In this talk, Kazuhiro Isobe, who is a PhD student in Physics Education Research at Tokyo Tech, will provide a perspective on PER in Japan as well as introduce his research into the Japanese high-school physics curricula, described in the below abstract.
One of the long-term goals of discipline-based education research (DBER) is to understand the nature and development of expertise in a discipline. Hence, the understanding of the systematic structures which consist of physical concepts and laws is indispensable for effective physics education in terms of Physics Education Research (PER). However, current high school physics curricula do not contain this aspect of physics as a discipline. In the course of the history of PER, the textbook of “Physical Science Study Committee (PSSC) Physics” as a discipline-centered curriculum was developed; however, it is no longer used today. On the other hand, the textbook of “Biological Sciences Curriculum Study (BSCS) Biology” is still used. One possible reason for the difference is whether it is based on pedagogy by Joseph J. Schwab or not. Therefore, the aim of this study is to analyze the description of “PSSC physics” in terms of ‘structure’ of the disciplines and ‘enquiry’ by Joseph J. Schwab. As a result of this study, two findings were obtained:
- The description of “PSSC physics” barely has any ‘syntactical structure’ at all.
- The description of “PSSC physics” is thorough, not only in ‘stable enquiry’, but also in ‘fluid enquiry’.
These findings are expected to lay the foundations of curriculum development in physics as a discipline in terms of pedagogy.