Physics Education is a peer-reviewed academic journal that covers the teaching of physics at the secondary school and introductory undergraduate levels. Its scope includes ideas and guidance for classroom teaching, demonstrations and laboratory experiments, international news on education developments, book reviews, equipment and multimedia products. The editor-in-chief is Gary Williams. The journal is abstracted and indexed in Inspec and ERIC/CIJE.

Physics education or physics education research (PER) refers both to the methods currently used to teach physics and to an area of pedagogical research that seeks to improve those methods. Historically, physics has been taught at the high school and college level primarily by the lecture method together with laboratory exercises aimed at verifying concepts taught in the lectures. These concepts are better understood when lectures are accompanied with demonstration, hand-on experiments, and questions that require students to ponder what will happen in an experiment and why. Students who participate in active learning for example with hands-on experiments learn through self-discovery. By trial and error they learn to change their preconceptions about phenomena in physics and discover the underlying concepts.