Physics education for the 21st Century

Throughout the world, governments are reorganizing their educational systems to meet the challenges of the 21st century. These challenges relate to globalisation of the marketplace, rapid technological development and resulting demands for new competencie s (creativity, flexibility, ICT-skills etc) in the workforce. Another feature of educational developments internationally is the call for scientific literacy. In this perspective, an interesting question is how science education can help students develop relevant competencies and scientific literacy. The present project focuses on upper secondary physics education, which in our view should serve at least three purposes: 1. Continue its traditional role of preparing students for higher education; 2. help students develop relevant competencies, and 3. d evelop students’ scientific literacy. The project aims at understanding how upper secondary physics can be developed to serve these purposes. The project starts with an “action research” phase where problems and challenges are identified and discussed with a group of physics teachers. The second phase will be “experimental research” with development and testing of new content and teaching eleme nts for upper secondary physics. Both quantitative and qualitative classroom research will be conducted. Two university groups will work on the project and international groups will be involved in the analytic and experimental phase.