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II. EVOLUTION OF UW PHYSICS COURSES FOR 
K-12 TEACHERS (1974-2006)
In the 1990s, the student population in the combined course 
gradually changed. It began to include physics graduate stu-
dents with a strong interest in teaching. The preservice course 
for elementary school teachers was discontinued. Thus there 
were no graduates of that course to take the combined course. 
We continued to offer the NSF Inservice Summer Institutes 
for teachers from elementary through high school, as well 
as an academic-year Continuation Course open to all former 
participants in any of our courses for teachers. 
The present version of Physics by Inquiry (PbI) is the result 
of a long iterative process. Not intended to be read like a text, 
PbI consists of laboratory-based modules that contain care-
fully structured experiments, exercises, and questions that 
require active intellectual involvement. The equipment is 
simple and can be reproduced in K-12 classrooms. The stu-
dents collaborate in small groups as they work through the 
PbI modules. Experiments and exercises provide the basis on 
which they construct physical concepts and develop scientifi c 
reasoning and representational skills. The role of the instruc-
tor is not to present information and answer questions but to 
engage students in dialogues that help them fi nd their own 
answers. Expressly designed for use with teachers, PbI has 
also worked well with other populations. 
PbI provides the opportunity to learn (or re-learn) physics 
in a way consistent with how teachers are expected to teach. It 
is characterized by four general principles: 
• Concepts, reasoning ability, and representational skills 
are developed together within a coherent body of subject 
matter. 
• Physics is taught as a process of inquiry, not as an inert 
body of information.
• The ability to make connections between the formalism of 
physics and real world phenomena is expressly developed.
• Certain common conceptual and reasoning diffi culties that 
students encounter in physics are expressly addressed.
Implementation in PbI of the fourth principle required sys-
tematic research to determine not only what students could or 
could not do but also whether the instructional strategies we 
developed were effective. Daily interactions with individual 
students in the combined course suggested that systematic 
questioning would be fruitful for probing student thinking 
in depth. During the early days of the combined course, we 
also began trying to identify the conceptual and reasoning 
diffi culties that physics presents to underprepared students 
who aspire to careers in science, mathematics, and medicine. 
In 1973, the year before the paper on the combined physics 
course was published, our group began exploring student 
understanding in physics by conducting individual demon-
stration interviews.
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The students involved were enrolled in 
the courses for K-12 teachers, special courses with similar 
content that we offered for under-prepared students, and the 
standard large introductory physics courses. In 1980–1981 
the American Journal of Physics published two papers that 
reported on some of this early research.
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During the 1990s we began to administer pretests and post-
tests to large numbers of students from the introductory to the 
graduate level. We identifi ed many similar intellectual hurdles 
with basic physics in all of these populations and often found 
that similar instructional strategies worked well. Teachers 
who might not have a particular diffi culty themselves would 
certainly have students who did. Therefore, a well-prepared 
teacher of physics or physical science should have acquired, 
in addition to a strong command of the subject matter, both 
knowledge of the challenges that it presents to students and 
familiarity with instructional strategies most likely to be 
effective. As the combined course evolved and as the devel-
opment of PbI progressed, the prospective teachers in our 
classes gained this experience.