Editorial: Reflections on the Origins of Physical Review Special Topics – Physics Education Research

Physics Education Research (PER) is a well-established subfield of physics.This was not always the case.The field is young enough that many practitioners can recall early efforts that were necessary to demonstrate PER's value.Prior to the 1990s, many (or perhaps most) physicists did not put much credence in the slowly growing body of research on the teaching and learning of their subject [1].Compounding this was the great difficulty in getting PER studies funded and published.Some research projects were actually "hidden" within instructional materials development grants that incorporated unusually extensive evaluation plans.As funding agencies [most importantly the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the US Department of Education Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE)] gradually became more interested in supporting studies of teaching and learning, researchers needed a publication venue dedicated to findings in physics education research.There were so many researchers seeking to share their findings at American Association of Physics Teachers (AAPT) meetings that there were complaints of PER talks dominating the schedule.Although the American Journal of Physics (AJP) was willing to publish a few education research articles per year, this was explicitly outside its mission.In 1999 a separate PER section, edited by Joe Redish, was added to AJP to address this situation.Unfortunately, a strict annual limit of 64 AJP pages assigned to PER and a glut of accepted papers made for long publication delays.Redish estimated that it might take four years before the existing backlog could be published, not even considering the additional papers that would be submitted during that time.About this same time the American Physical Society published their Statement 99.2 on Research in Physics Education [2], recognizing the value of PER within physics departments.It noted: "Physics education research can and should be subject to the same criteria for evaluation (papers published, grants, etc.) as research in other fields of physics."This important support was cause for celebration within the field but also placed the traditional academic "publish or perish" burden on those working in PER.In 2001, the annual Physics Education Research Conference began publishing peer-reviewed proceedings.By 2003 these proceedings were placed under the American Institute of Physics publication banner.This partially addressed the publication burden.However, proceedings papers were by their nature very short, and even peer-reviewed proceedings papers are not always acceptable to tenure committees.There was still little opportunity for researchers to publish full-length manuscripts.The PER community recognized publication as a major concern for the field.According to the 2003 report [3] of Stamatis Vokos, chair of the AAPT's Research in Physics Education Committee, "The continuing success of physics education research is not without grave challenges.The field has a disproportionately large number of junior, untenured faculty.In an informal Committee poll of recently appointed PER faculty, the difficulty of identifying sources of research funding and the scarcity of venues for publication of research results were cited as the two most significant threats to their professional success."Ongoing discussions at AAPT meetings highlighted the need for additional places for publication of PER.

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