Physics Education Research trends in Iberoamerican journals

Abstract

This paper provides a systematic review syntheses of literature reviews concerning Physics Education Research (PER) in the last two decades. For this synthesis, we searched into 33 different peer-reviewed Iberoamerican journals individually, and we were able to gather and narrow down to 31 literature review articles from four different Iberoamerican countries. The search period was from January 2000 to June 2020. We adopted Bardin’s (2016) content analysis as a theoretical framework; hence, grouping all the literature review articles into four different dimensions concerning: teaching level; physics content; didactical strategies; and physics education related to other contexts. Our findings indicated that most literature reviews are from the last decade, and 45% are aimed to describe the presence of specific content of physics. Of all these, 71% are related to topics in modern and contemporary physics. The 55% is divided into literature reviews concerning the use of didactical strategies, or the relation of physics education to other contexts. Moreover, concerning the quality of information disclosure related to the reviews’ description methods, we have found that 17 out of 31 are of high quality. We point out the absence of literature review in PER that searched for the presence of theoretical frameworks, based on didactical or psychological theoretical references, as a basis to plan or apply didactic sequences of any physical content.