Dr. Noah Podolefsky

1. Do you teach classes as part of your research in physics education? If not, do you miss teaching classes?
I do not teach classes formally. On occasion I assist with teaching if I am involved in research in a course (this depends on the research design.) I would like to do more teaching, but my present time commitments as a post-doc would be prohibitive.

2. Describe your standard week.
My week varies quite a bit. I have pretty flexible hours - I don't need to show up anywhere except for specific meetings.

Much of my work is design of educational computer simulations. I am lucky enough to do a lot of this work from home or a coffee shop. I go into the office for meetings and on days when there may be a lot of in-person discussions. I have at least 4 meetings per week, each about 1.5 hours. Often 2-3 more meetings are added on, depending on who needs a face-to-face conversation. I work with 2 supervisors, 4 software developers, and several practicing teachers. This is why all the meetings. I don't think this is typical for a post-doc.

I split my time between simulation design / development and research about 50/50. I'm currently working on about 10 different simulation projects, and 2-3 research projects...so I do a lot of juggling and have to carefully track and organize my time. Also atypical for a post-doc, I keep a detailed log of my time spent on various activities and projects. I also fill out weekly progress reports that let the rest of the group know what I've been doing.

I spend a significant amount of time interviewing students to test the simulations. About one week per month I spend 4-8 hours on these interviews. Then I analyze the interviews and generate a document for changes that should be made to the simulations. These interviews sometimes contribute to more basic research as well.

I also spend a significant amount of time reading and writing research papers.

3. Often physics education papers cite assessment results that span several years. Is any of your research short term (you get results within a year) or does all of your research take multiple years of gathering data before you have publishable results?
My research generally uses data collected within a year - sometimes within a couple of weeks. However, our group has a significant amount of data that has been collected over several years that does get incorporated into research ideas and findings. So the answer is, a bit of both, but usually less than a year.

4. Besides your knowledge of physics what skills do you find most useful in conducting research in physics education?
Interpersonal skills. PER is an especially contentious and political discipline. Managing relationships with people, networking, and not stepping on toes is very important.

I also find it extremely useful to have a broad knowledge of PER, but also other fields. PER borrows heavily from cognitive science, education research, psychology, sociology, etc. One should read PER papers, but not just PER papers. It is also very useful, I find, to try and keep from being too constrained by other researchers' framing of problems and research goals. PER is still very much in a state of defining itself and its goals, so part of contributing is adding to the communities notion of what it is about. Sometimes this means verifying or replicating other research, but it often means blazing new trails.

5. Do you have any advice for students pursuing a physics PhD in an area other than education that would like to move into physics education research after they graduate?
First and foremost, be sure you want to try doing PER. This doesn't mean you need to be sure you will like it - but don't try to find a position in PER because you don't want to do traditional physics or think it is going to be easier. My opinion is that it is just as hard, maybe harder in some cases.

One thing that may help is to demonstrate interest while you are in graduate school. Take a class or two in education. Spend an extra semester as a TA (the teaching experience will help your research anyway). If possible, attend the annual AAPT conference (and PERC if you can). Meet people in PER and get to know them...most of the PER folks are very friendly and would love to talk to you about what they do.