PEER Physics

Our curriculum-driven professional learning communities provide general and specific tools that lay the foundations for grades 9-12 experiences in science. We invite you to consider PEER Physics, which is adaptable and will set students up for success in conceptual physics and physical science, as well as for other science disciplines, mathematics, and engineering. PEER Physics was developed at the University of Colorado Boulder (CU Boulder), through support from the National Science Foundation and in close collaboration with teachers, some of whom are leaders in the PEER Physics team. We provide a suite of resources that are designed to help teachers meet the high expectations of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) by engaging students in doing science – namely, developing scientific principles and models from evidence. The NGSS demonstrate a vision for what effective science instruction and learning can look like - students will spend more time posing questions and discovering answers for themselves, rather than memorizing a set of facts that have little personal meaning. This process is the crux of PEER Physics, which provides opportunities for students to make connections among the physical sciences, engage in scientific argumentation involving shared observations, create explanations that make sense to them, develop and revise models, and come to community consensus with their classmates about their conclusions. With PEER Physics, teachers create learning environments in which students collaborate and argue on the basis of evidence, create and interpret graphical representations, explore differences between observations and inferences, weigh costs and benefits of models of phenomena, engage in engineering design challenges and mathematical modeling, and build general decision-making skills applicable in a democratic society.