Is physics education research based on a representative sample of students? To answer this question we skimmed physics education research papers from three journals for the years 1970–2015 looking for the number of research subjects, the course the subjects were enrolled in, and the institution where the research was conducted. We combined this data with demographics data about these institutions to compile a profile of physics education research subjects, and compared the demographics of this population to those of all students taking physics in the United States. Our results suggest that physics education research subjects, as a whole, are better prepared mathematically and are from a narrow and unrepresentative subset of our intended target physics student populations. For this reason, findings from research may not be as generalizable to all student populations as we have previously assumed.

中文翻译：

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物理教育研究人口统计

物理教育研究是否基于有代表性的学生样本？为了回答这个问题，我们从1970-2015年间的三本期刊中摘录了物理教育研究论文，以寻找研究对象的数量，研究对象的课程以及进行研究的机构。我们将这些数据与有关这些机构的人口统计学数据相结合，以编制物理学教育研究主题的概况，并将该人口统计学与美国所有从事物理研究的学生的统计学进行比较。我们的结果表明，整体而言，物理教育研究主题在数学上做得更好，并且来自我们预期的目标物理学生群体的狭窄且没有代表性的子集。为此原因，