Teacher preparedness

Nearly 40% of high school physics teachers teach mostly other subjects. About the same percentage say they are not adequately prepared in some areas. Those and other findings come from a 2012–13 survey conducted by the Statistical Research Center of the American Institute of Physics, which asked 27 000 high school physics teachers from across the US—more than a third of them women—how well prepared they felt for the job.

Teachers were asked to rate themselves as “not adequately,” “adequately,” or “very adequately” prepared in seven categories: basic physics, other science, application of physics to everyday experience, use of demonstrations, instructional laboratory design, use of computers in physics instruction and labs, and recent developments in physics.

In several categories, a higher proportion of men than women say they are at least adequately prepared. The largest gender gap was in how prepared teachers felt they are to teach recent developments in physics, with about three out of four male teachers reporting they are adequately or very adequately prepared, compared with roughly three out of five female teachers. But the report stresses that the self-reporting is subjective and that it is “entirely possible that women are objectively just as well prepared as men.”

For more details, see the report High School Physics Teacher Preparation, available at https://www.aip.org/statistics/highschool . An earlier report summarizes objective aspects of teacher preparation (see Physics Today, March 2015, page 26 ).