Paul Chambers

My interests lie around the development of curricular materials and teaching for all levels of physical science. Obviously maintaining the physics curricular input to the PGDE is a main focus but recently I have developed expertise in Primary /Early years science. In particular, the use of literacy approaches and play based pedagogies. This has developed into delivering CPD courses with colleagues in the school of education who specialize in these areas but lack scientific curricular expertise.

Recently my development of the particle accelerator apparatus has focussed my attention into the Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK) approaches into this area. There are two areas of research related to this apparatus currently being investigated.

These are:

• Pupil use and how the models contribute to the understanding of the function of electric and magnetic fields.
• Teacher opinion with respect to the use and or viability of the models in a school context.

 My main expertise is in the writing of science text books for school and University.

I have contributed to over 24 texts over the past 20 years.

I am a Fellow of the Institute of Physics

I am a member of the Association for Science Education (ASE)

Editorial Board member of the ASE’s Primary Science Journal

I was awarded the Marie Curie Sklowska Medal from the Institute of Physics in 2020