  I believe that most teachers develop a belief in a set of pedagogical
practices. As we teach, we try different ways to teach topics and then judge
how successful the methods were. After several years, we have a compilation of
techniques in our teaching toolbox. New teachers are at a disadvantage because
they have fewer prior experiences to draw upon. Luckily, there is a group of
physicists and physics educators who are researching how students learn
physics, and have been able to show evidence of effective education practices
in physics. They field of study is called PER: Physics Education Research. I
asked Chandralekha Singh, one of the leaders in PER, to summarize some of the
most relevant PER findings and her response follows.
