Broadening the Base: High School Physics Education at the Turn of the New Century

Highlights from the 2001 Nationwide Survey of High School Physics Teachers

by Michael Neuschatz and Mark McFarling

Enrollments in high school physics have continued their impressive rise since the middle of the 1980’s (Figure 1). The number of students taking physics is now approaching one million. Yet, despite these gains, two out of every three high school seniors across the country head for graduation without ever having taken a separate course in physics.
The overall participation of girls in high school physics classes remains close to parity, consolidating the gains of the late 1980s and early 1990s (Figure 3). However, gaps persist, with girls more concentrated in basic introductory classes and less evident among those sitting for advanced placement physics exams.
The long-standing disparity in physics enrollments between white and Asian-American students on the one hand, and African-American and Hispanic students on the other, has shown a marked reduction in the past four years (Figure 4). However, it is too soon to say whether this will develop into the type of consistent trend that helped to reduce gender disparity over the last two decades.
Rising enrollments have also brought benefits to the corps of physics teachers, now numbering 21,300 (Table 5). In the past four years, more teachers have been able to concentrate on physics teaching (Figure 5), and more now consider themselves to be physics specialists (Figure 6), rather than primarily as specialists in other fields who have just been called upon to teach a class or two in physics. On the whole, teachers regard themselves as better prepared in physics than was previously the case (Table 8), although there remain important areas where teacher confidence is still not very high.
Despite all these significant gains, there are also areas where little change has occurred over the past fifteen years. For example, less than a fourth of high school physics teachers majored in physics in college, and even when degrees in physics education are included, the proportion increases to only a third. (Figure 7).
Professional activity and continuing education are other areas where progress has been slow (Table 12). Only a quarter of all respondents are members of the US physics teacher professional society, the American Association of Physics Teachers (Figure 11), and more than half belong to neither the AAPT nor the National Science Teachers Association.
Other aspects of professional life also remain problematic. While both starting and continuing teacher salaries have risen steadily--outpacing inflation during the period (Figure 13) (Figure 14)--they continue to lag behind many of the alternative career options available to those with academic credentials in science (Figure 15). And the amount of funding schools provide for laboratory supplies and equipment also remains woefully inadequate, both in absolute (Figure 9) and subjective (Table 10) terms.
One of the likely spurs to increased enrollments in physics has been the differentiation of the curriculum. In the mid-1980s, over 80% of the students took the traditional algebra- and trigonometry-based introductory course. That figure is now down to 65%, with almost all the difference accounted for by growth at the two ends of the academic spectrum. The last 15 years have seen a more than quadrupling of enrollments in Advanced Placement Physics, and in conceptual physics and similar courses for students with a more limited math background (Figure 2).
Many teachers have embraced the arrival of conceptual physics, and few regard its growth as coming at the expense of enrollments in higher level courses. However, we found much less enthusiasm for the notion of inverting the traditional sequence of high school science courses to teach physics first, prior to biology or chemistry (Table 16). Still, in the few places where such an approach had already been tried, primarily private schools and a handful of public schools (Figure 16), there was much more enthusiasm for the idea (Figure 17). Whether or not this positive experience can be successfully generalized to encompass the mainstream of public schools remains an open question.