The communities of practice (COP) framework is useful in understanding the effort to expand physics education into professional preparation. This framework prompts physics educators and physics education researchers to consider "what counts as doing physics" that we want to prepare students for and how we can model professional physics…

To provide an accurate reading of students' and schools' rates of progress, and to provide cues for instruction, assessment at every level should be connected to explicit learning goals and standards. To show how this requirement can be fulfilled, and how research-based assessment can effectively support learning and instruction, this article…

Prepared for discussion at an Adult Education Research Conference, this paper offers commentary and summative evaluation of eleven doctoral dissertations on the process of determining educational or training needs of specific adult populations. As context for discussion Joe Ellis' definitions of needs--Felt, Real, and Education--are noted along…