Session J11: Invited Session: Excellence in Physics Education Award: AMTA

Excellence in Physics Education Award: Modeling Theory for Physics Instruction

All humans create \textit{mental models} to plan and guide their interactions with the physical world. Science has greatly refined and extended this ability by creating and validating formal \textit{scientific models} of physical things and processes. Research in physics education has found that mental models created from everyday experience are largely incompatible with scientific models. This suggests that the fundamental problem in learning and understanding science is coordinating mental models with scientific models. \textit{Modeling Theory} has drawn on resources of cognitive science to work out extensive implications of this suggestion and guide development of an approach to science pedagogy and curriculum design called \textit{Modeling Instruction}. Modeling Instruction has been widely applied to high school physics and, more recently, to chemistry and biology, with noteworthy results.   

Excellence in Physics Education Award: Graduate Programs for Professional Development of Physics Teachers

The landscape for high school physics is changing rapidly, especially with the need to merge physics into a coherent STEM curriculum that smoothly integrates it with chemistry and biology. Accordingly, there is an urgent need for graduate professional development programs to help in-service teachers cope with these changes. One such program was created in 2001 by the physics department at \textit{Arizona State University} after a decade of NSF funding for the \textit{Modeling Instruction Program}. We discuss what has been learned from that experience with recommendations for creating similar programs at other universities.