Jose Mestre

Professor

Ph.D., Physics, Univ. Massachusetts, 1979

Professor Mestre received bachelor's and PhD degrees in physics from the University of Massachusetts in 1974 and 1979, respectively, and spent his entire career until 2005, at the University of Massachusetts, rising rapidly through the ranks from research associate to full professor.

He came to Urbana in August 2005, as a full professor of physics and of educational psychology. Although trained as a nuclear physicist, his academic interests evolved more than 20 years ago to the questions of how students learn physics. He is a distinguished scholar of physics learning and arguably the most highly regarded researcher in the field of physics education in the United States. He has adapted tools from cognitive and educational psychology to investigate forefront issues in the development of scientific knowledge and how it is conveyed in instruction.

Other Activities

My research focuses on the organization and deployment of physics knowledge by experts and novices. In my research, I address questions such as: What is the mechanism by which a beginner develops expertise in a complex domain such as physics? Why is it that the problem solving skills for traditional textbook physics problems often develop faster than conceptual understanding? Why is appropriate transfer of knowledge, even across the same domain and across remarkably similar contexts, so difficult to achieve?

In the future, I plan to research the application of experimental techniques common in cognitive science (e.g., eye-tracking, fMRI, ERP) to learn more fine-grained information about the nature of expertise, learning, and problem solving in the sciences.

Honors and awards:

• Distinguished Faculty Lecturer, Univ. Massachusetts, 2000-2001
• Chancellor's Medal recipient, for exemplary & extraordinary service to the Univ. of Massachusetts, 2001

Selected Publications:

• J. P. Mestre. Implications of research on learning for the education of prospective science and physics teachers. Physics Education, 36, 44-51 (2001 ).
• R. J. Dufresne, W. J. Gerace, W. J. Leonard, J. P. Mestre, and L. Wenk. Classtalk: A classroom communication system for active learning. Journal of Computing in Higher Education, 7, 3-47 (1996).
• W. J. Leonard, R. J. Dufresne, and J. P. Mestre. Using qualitative problem-solving strategies to highlight the role of conceptual knowledge in solving problems. American Journal of Physics, 64, 1495-1503 (1996).
• J. P. Mestre, W. J. Gerace, and D. A. Sparrow. The effect of center of mass correlations and intermediate states on π-He Scattering. Phys. Rev. C, 24, 2363-2366 (1981).
• W. J. Gerace, J. P. Mestre , J. F. Walker, and D. A. Sparrow. Nuclear form factor sensitivity in the reaction ³He(π^-, π⁰)³H. Phys. Rev. C, 22, 1197-1201 (1980).