Network for Astronomy School Education, NASE, is a project that is organizing courses for teachers throughout the entire world. The main objective of the project is to prepare secondary and primary school teachers in astronomy. Students love to know more about astronomy and teachers have the opportunity to observe the sky that every school has…

This article describes the genesis and nature of a 40-day course intended to improve the teaching of physics in England by teachers not originally trained in the subject. It also describes early experiences and discusses course evaluation. An accompanying article by James de Winter reviews experiences as described by participating teachers.…

This article aims to explore some of the experiences of participants on the Science as an Additional Specialism (SASP) physics course. It draws from feedback, assignment work and course evaluations from all of the 22 teachers who were participants on the course at the Science Learning Centre East of England at Bayfordbury, in the 2009-10 academic…

The Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) require teachers to understand aspects of energy degradation and the second law of thermodynamics, including energy's availability and usefulness, changes in energy concentration, and the tendency of energy to spread uniformly. In an effort to develop learning goals that support teachers in…

The nature of energy is not typically an explicit topic of physics instruction. Nonetheless, verbal and graphical representations of energy articulate models in which energy is conceptualized as a quasimaterial substance, a stimulus, or a vertical location. We argue that a substance ontology for energy is particularly productive in developing…

The Energy Project at Seattle Pacific University has developed representations that embody the substance metaphor and support learners in conserving and tracking energy as it flows from object to object and changes form. Such representations enable detailed modeling of energy dynamics in complex physical processes. We assess student learning by…

This article reports on an experimental scheme in adult education designed for people with curiosity about, but limited formal education in, science. It is offered within a department of humanities and focuses on "ideas" drawn from science, rather than on facts, phenomena or formulae. It involves different approaches to teaching, learning and the…

How can one increase the awareness of teachers to the existence and importance of knowledge gained through physics education research (PER) and provide them with capabilities to use it? How can one enrich teachers' physics knowledge and the related pedagogical content knowledge of topics singled out by PER? In this paper we describe a professional…