PSSC

50 Years Later

PSSC PHYSICS: A Personal Perspective

by Uri Haber-Schaim
Introduction
Early in 1957 Jerrold Zacharias called a meeting of the faculty of the Department of
Physics at MIT to brief us on his initiative to develop a physics course for high schools.
He reported on a conference held at MIT in December 1956 and on plans to hold a
working session at MIT in the coming summer to produce a draft of the new course to be
tried out in some schools. The meeting was not billed as a recruiting meeting.
Nevertheless, thinking of the need of a summer job, and having had experience in
tutoring high-school students in mathematics and physics, I thought that it might be
worthwhile to look further into this enterprise. After some discussions with Francis
Friedman, I was recruited to join the project in the spring of 1957.
My first intensive work on the project was in the summer of 1957, when I was assigned
to the Wave Group. Initially, this group was led by Francis Friedman. But a few weeks
into the summer, Fran asked me to take over the leadership of the group because he had
to move into the lead position for the entire textbook. This was the end of a soft summer
job and the beginning of my sustained involvement with PSSC Physics that tapered off
only in recent years, and which covered all parts of the project except the films and the
Science Study Series.
The purpose of this paper is to review the essential aspects of the Physical Science Study
Committee (PSSC) project and to see what can be learned from it for the benefit of future
revisions of science curricula. To this end I will first describe briefly the physics teaching
scene in the country in the mid nineteen fifties before giving a more detailed description
of the project itself.

High-School Physics Around 1956

Although textbooks were available from several publishers, Holt had the lions share of
the high-school physics market with their Modern Physics by Dull, Metcalfe, and Brooks.
The first chapter, titled Matter and Energy, was 8 pages long, including several
photographs, a vocabulary list, and questions. The definitions were the usual ones:
Matter is anything which occupies space and has weight; Energy may be defined as the
ability to do work. Protons, neutrons, and electrons were mentioned without a word
about how we know about them. In contrast, the chapter on machines was 35 pages long,
with numerous line drawings of gears and levers, culminating in the well-known
centerfold of the power shovel. In the entire book there were no descriptions of
experiments or graphs of results of experiments that would justify any of the books
many assertive statements.
There was no laboratory program to go with the textbook. A check of the equipment
catalogs of that time will show that there was little apparatus for sale that was
inexpensive enough for student use. Most of the items were intended for college use or, at
best, for bench demonstrations by the teacher. With few exceptions, students taking

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50 Years Later

physics had hardly any previously acquired lab skills. For them science was equated with
vocabulary.
The only nationally administered high-school tests were the College Board tests produced
by Educational Testing Service (ETS). New York State had its Regents Exams. These
tests were geared to the content of the then existing programs.
This was the environment into which PSSC Physics was born.

The December 1956 Conference

Zacharias had a general idea of what he wanted the course to do:
1. The course should present physical science. The original idea was to have a twoyear combination of physics and chemistry as a living discipline, not as a body of
finished, codified facts to be memorized. In todays language, Zacharias wanted
an inquiry-based approach.
2. The course should use all kinds of learning aids that could be made available at
that time: films, slides, textbooks, laboratory apparatus for students and teachers,
homework, and ancillary reading.
Zacharias realized from the start that the project required a large pool of talent. He invited
interested individuals and groups to prepare some general ideas for discussion. A group
of about 50 people, most of them university physicists, responded and attended a threeday meeting at MIT in December 1956. They came primarily from MIT, Cornell, the
University of Illinois, and Bell Laboratories. Among the better-known names were Hans
Bethe, Leon Cooper, Nathaniel Frank, Francis Friedman, Philip Morrison, Edward
Purcell, I. I. Rabi, Bruno Rossi, and Jerrold Zacharias. The participants were sent a list of
high-school books for reading before the meeting, and they came well prepared with
concrete ideas.
To the best of my knowledge, the deliberations were not recorded. But Laura Fermi, who
had been widowed just two years earlier and who was invited to attend as a generalist,
took brief notes. Her notes are very revealing. Readers with experience in departmental
discussions of course content might expect that the participants would have argued
intensely about the choice of specific topics and ways to teach them. Nothing of the kind
happened. Here are some gems from the discussion:
It is an accident that planets are there.
Show how to simplify, how to investigate.
They know a lot of physics if they know how to order phenomena.
The whole problem is harder than realized.

2006 American Association of Physics Teachers.

Rabi
Friedman
Rabi
U. of Illinois
group

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50 Years Later

Choice of subject should be subordinate to purpose. If too difficultomit.

(Unidentified)

Ideas: regularities, model, extrapolations, limitation.

(Unidentified)

To accommodate development of scientific thought, one must sacrifice

some subject matter.

Bethe

Wave-particle is a beautiful story but extremely difficulteven at graduate

level.

Rabi

Just because it is subtle, we should introduce it early. The difficulty at

graduate level is that they had not been exposed to it before.
Organizations of superintendents, principals, etc., should be involved in
implementation. Point is, when?
At the very next meeting of the group, so they have a feeling they will be in
the process.
Target in 18 months.
They must be in the process.
O.K. perhaps a meeting for that purpose, but not one of our meetings.

U. of Illinois
group
Zacharias

Rabi

Zacharias
Rabi
Zacharias

A very important point was made at the December meeting, namely, the distinction
between objectives and vehicles. First and foremost, science was to be presented as a
human endeavor. More specifically, the following ideas were to play a primary role in the
selection of topics and their interrelationship:

The unity of physical science.

The observation of regularities leading to the formulation of laws.

The prediction of phenomena from laws.

The limitations of laws.

The importance of models in the development of physics.

For students to understand these ideas, the participants in the December meeting
recognized the need for a central theme and a careful selection of subject matter. The
central theme was to be the atomic nature of matter in the universe. This decision was the

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50 Years Later

reason for the intention to combine physics and chemistry, as well as for the name of the
committee.
From all accounts the conference was informal and harmonious. However, there was one
clash on a key question of approach. The advocates of the two opposing approaches were
Philip Morrison and I. I. Rabi. In response to an interviewer in 1975, Morrison recalled it
as follows:
Morrison: There was a big fight that ensued between me and
Rabi, and it was very influential in the final design of
the course, for good or for bad.
Interviewer: On?
Morrison: On whether the aim of the course should be to take
well-defined intellectual threads and follow them
through in considerable detail, showing the power of
inductive and deductive styles in doing science; or
whether the emphasis should be in showing the
breadth of science, of physics, and its application
everywhere, and making many kinds of arguments
that are united in it, a broad sweep of the whole
thingwhich are two sort of opposing points of
view.
Morrisons approach manifested itself in Part 1 of the course, called The Universe,
which he wrote. The example that Rabi gave of his approach was Snells Law and all that
can be learned from it in terms of Newtons particle model and the wave model. Snells
law indeed played a central role in Part 2 of the course, Optics and Waves.

The Summer of 1957 Working Session

During the spring of 1957, an outline
was prepared for at least part of the
course. So when a large group
assembled for the summer at MIT,
there was already an outline and
some preliminary models of
equipment, such as a ripple tank.
The working session was organized
on the principles of system
engineering: all aspects of the
problem
were
addressed
simultaneously
by
competent
persons in the various relevant
fields. The photograph of the group
taken during the summer shows
almost all the participants (Figure 1).

2006 American Association of Physics Teachers.

Figure 1 - Most of the group working at MIT in

the summer of 1957. (Jerrold Zacharias and
Philip Morrison are absent.)

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50 Years Later

There were university and high-school physics teachers, editors, equipment technicians,
filmmakers, graphic artists, experts on testing, and typists.
The question of testing deserves a special mention. Quite early in the session, when we
were still working on experiments and photographs for our chapters and had barely
written a line of text, I had two visitors: Gilbert Finlay, professor of science education at
the University of Illinois, and Frederick Ferris of ETS. They were developing tests for the
course with the aim of finding out whether the course was effective in teaching the
students what we wanted them to learn. They could tell from the outline what topics we
were working on, but they wanted to know what the Wave Group expected the students
to be able to do. Our leadership recognized from the start that the new course would be
sufficiently different from the existing ones that new tests, consistent with the objectives
of the coursenot just with the contentwould be needed.

19571960
Testing the new material started in the fall of 1957 in eight pilot schools; their teachers all
participated in the working session during the previous summer. Then in the summer of
1958 there were several NSF-supported summer institutes and many of the teachers
attending these institutes taught pilot versions of the program in the 19581959 school
year.
The feedback from the pilot schools had a strong effect on the preparation of the first
commercial edition of the written materials. Feedback was provided not only in written
form but also orally at Area Meetings. The chapters on kinematics and vectors had
already been rewritten after the first pilot year. Other chapters were worked on later.
It would be a mistake to think that the revisions were limited to extended editorial
changes. Zacharias deserves much credit for bowing to reality and going along with
major changes in the means of reaching the goals of the program. This is best illustrated
by the following two examples:
1) Originally the films were intended to provide the backbone of the course.
However, the films took much longer to make than expected and were by their
nature not suitable for this purpose. In reality, the textbook and the laboratory
guide became the backbone of the course.
2) Originally the equipment for the experiments was to be made by the students.
(Anyone from the outside who looked at the shipping platform at project
headquarters would have thought that we were in the lumber business!) The pilot
edition of the lab guide consisted of several booklets. The first booklet was
devoted exclusively to building equipment with simple tools. The acquisition of
such skills is desirable, but not at the expense of the physics. Furthermore, no
teacher would throw out the equipment at the end of the year and start from
scratch the next year. We switched to low-cost manufactured equipment. The first
set of booklets was discarded and a new pilot lab guide was prepared.
When the first commercial edition of PSSC Physics appeared in the fall of 1960, there
was a full set of learning aids, including a textbook, a laboratory guide, an extensive
teachers guide, achievement tests, films, popular monographs, and new laboratory

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equipment. New knowledge was to be acquired by the students from various sources:
sometimes from the textbook, sometimes from the lab work, other times from a film or
from the teacher. The whole battery of learning aids was intended to be used in a new
way. To convey the spirit of science, the textbook was written in a narrative style, which
demanded that the students follow the development of ideas rather than look for a brief
statement of a law. Reading science was a skill that had to be acquired.
The way in which the laboratory work was used was also new for American students in
the early 1960s. Gone was the cookbook approach, with its detailed instructions and
ready-to-fill tables. With economically designed equipment, the lab became the place
where the entire class could converse with nature and try to recognize its regularities.
The films not only presented experiments that could not be done in the classroom, but
also enabled the students to identify physics with a rich variety of practicing physicists.
The objectives of PSSC Physics were so different from those of the standard course that
the existing College Board achievement test could not serve as a proper measure for the
students in the program. Therefore, ETS was contacted, and a separate achievement test
for PSSC students was produced that became available in March of 1960. (From 1962
through 1964 students could choose between the standard test, the PSSC form, or a
combined form. From 1965 on, only the combined form was offered.) For several years
the New York State Regents tests also had regular and PSSC versions.
In those days, tests were the servants of education, not the masters.

Implementation and Growth

In appreciating the growth in the use of
PSSC Physics, it is important to
remember that adoption of the project
was entirely voluntary. Yes, after
Sputnik, Federal funding for teacher
training and equipment became widely
available. However, to use this money
wisely required informed teachers.
The system approach used by Zacharias
included planning for teacher training.
Starting with five summer institutes in
1958, the number of teacher-training
institutes rose rapidly (Figure 2). The
institutes were a crucial component of
the implementation of PSSC Physics
because even the most comprehensive
teachers guide is of limited value in
developing certain teaching skills,
especially those related to the use of the
laboratory. This hands-on experience
and an understanding of the spirit of the

2006 American Association of Physics Teachers.

Figure 2 - PSSC Institutes: Summer

Institutes (red), In-service Institutes (dark
blue), Academic Year Institutes (light
blue)
(From
Educational
Services
Incorporated (ESI) progress reports.)

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50 Years Later

course were acquired in the summer and other in-service programs. NSF funded most of
the programs. The effect of the teacher-training institutes is seen in the following two
figures (Figures 3 and 4).

Figure 3: Number of trained PSSC

teachers. (ESI progress reports.)

Figure 4: Number of PSSC students.

(ESI progress reports.)

The Later Editions

The publication of the First Edition in 1960 did not bring an end to the project. Feedback
continued to come in, and it became increasingly clear that some fundamental problems
remained unsolved. In particular:
1) Although many traditional topics, such as statics and alternating current had been
excluded, the course was still too long. Many classes never made it beyond the
beginning of Part 4, Electricity and Atomic Structure. Yet, for schools that
wanted to offer a second year of physics, there was not enough material.
2) Part 1 posed serious teaching problems. Although Part 1 contained a number of
simple experiments on the measurement of times, lengths, and masses, it was, for
the most part, assertive. Of course, the idea was that Part 1 would serve to set the
stage for most of the year, but it was very difficult for teachers and students to go
lightly over Part 1, as was intended, and thus allow more time for Parts 24. The
schedule suggested in the Teachers Guide was just not realistic.
The Planning Committee for the project decided to embark on two projects: extending the
PSSC course both upward and downward in terms of the target population. Work in the
upward direction concentrated on developing additional material on key topics that had to
be left out of the one-year course. These included angular momentum and its
conservation; statistical thermodynamics leading to the Second Law of thermodynamics;
relativistic kinematics and the extension of conservation laws of energy and momentum
to the relativistic domain; and quantum systems beyond the hydrogen atom. After several
years of piloting, this material appeared as the Advanced Topics Supplement. (It was a

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50 Years Later

paperback with a violet cover, symbolically continuing the spectrum of the red, yellow,
green, and blue paperbacks of the PSSC preliminary edition.) Actually, it was
recommended that teachers wishing to use the additional material either combine it with
the end of the course into a second-year program or intersperse it at the appropriate
places to create a three- or four-semester course.
The downward extension addressed the original central theme of PSSC, namely, the
evidence for the existence of atoms. Known in-house as the junior-high project, it was
later renamed Introductory Physical Science (IPS). It was clear from the start that this
could be done with mathematical tools limited to arithmetic and simple graphing. It was
also established that most of the relevant experiments could be done with very simple
equipment in any classroom with flat tables and one sink. The approach to atomicity was
strongly influenced by Part 1 of PSSC.
The educational objectives of IPS were quite close to the original objectives of PSSC.
Looking at the combination of the two courses from the point of view of the learner, the
time spent on Part 1 of PSSC could be used more effectively on other topics.
By the time the third edition of PSSC was published (1971), IPS was already so widely
spread in the 9th and 8th grades across the country that Part 1 could be eliminated without
harming the main objectives of the course. In the third and fourth editions, the course
started with optics. In the many schools that used both programs, there was now more
time to do a thorough job with PSSC. By bringing its program into the junior-high school,
PSSC also reached a larger segment of the student population than any 12th -grade course
in physics and, possibly, all physics courses combined.
The third and later editions were no longer produced with NSF support and were no
longer supervised by the PSSC Planning Committee, which disbanded. NSF ruled that the
original material be available to any U.S. Person under free license. My co-authors and
I were the only ones who took up the challenge. The millionth copy of PSSC Physics was
sold when the book was in its fourth edition (Figures 5 and 6).

Figure 5 - Jerrold Zacharias

speaking at the reception in
honor of the millionth copy
of PSSC Physics sold.

2006 American Association of Physics Teachers.

Figure 6 - Uri Haber-Schaim receiving

from the president and the science editor
of D. C. Heath, publisher of the first six
editions, a specially bound copy of PSSC
Physics to commemorate the millionth
copy sold.

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50 Years Later

Lessons for the Future

What are the most important conclusions that future developers of physics programs can
draw from the PSSC experience? Is the present educational climate conducive to such
enterprises? With respect to the first question, I would make the following two
suggestions.
The first step should be to define a set of general objectives and then to work down to
specific content and methodologies, ending up with a curriculum. Starting from a
syllabus, i.e., a list of topics, and then leaving it to the schools to decide what to do with
the topics leads to an overcrowded syllabus with little opportunity of reaching any
worthwhile long-term objectives. Unfortunately, the National Science Standards did just
that, and so did individual states. The reckless addition of topics to existing syllabi is
largely responsible for the ever-increasing size of textbooks and the decreasing amount of
time spent on each topic.
The inclusion of such topics as understanding the nature of science by itself does not
produce the desired result. It will at most produce a test question like How many steps
are in the scientific method?
Second, a curriculum project has to be led by imaginative people with a deep
understanding of the subject matter. Otherwise, the developers will follow the natural
inclination of continuing along the beaten path.
As one of the examples of the validity of this statement, we need only look at the
introduction of waves in the PSSC program. Mathematically, a pure sinusoidal wave is
simpler than a pulse. This is probably the reason why for many years the study of waves
started with sinusoidal waves. From the point of view of the physics, pulses are much
simpler. This was the path taken in the PSSC program.
Another example is the teaching of kinematics before dynamics. The chapter on
kinematics was the most rewritten chapter in the textbook. Yet only in the seventh edition
did we realize that it is much better to introduce acceleration after students have
experimented with motion under the influence of forces rather than the other way around.
In the case of topics that had not been taught before at the high-school level, there is the
danger of simply opting for a watered-down version of what is taught at the university
level. Again, there is no substitute for a thorough command of the material when sound
ways for an elementary presentation of new topics are needed. This point is particularly
relevant in the context of introducing contemporary physics into introductory courses.
When PSSC was started, the implicit assumption was that whatever science students
learned, they learned in class. No one bothered to find out what ideas about nature
students brought to their first science class. Today, we know that most students have
some deeply rooted ideas about the world around them. These ideas are sometimes based
on the students own experience, and sometimes they are the result of the use of the daily
language. Often they are at variance with the correct ideas. Future curriculum projects
should take this knowledge seriously. If they do, it will have a profound effect on the
outcome. (A simple example: The widely spread reflex to Aristotelian reasoning in
qualitative questions in mechanics cannot be overcome by assigning more plug-in drill on

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a computer screen. However, it can be overcome with more demonstrating, more

experimenting, and more qualitative thinking. All of this takes time, and thus something
else will have to be left out.)
The system approach, which was so important in the development of PSSC, must be
extended. The last 30 years have clearly demonstrated the severe limitations of
independent course-by-course reforms. What is called for is primarily coordination, not
integration, among courses in the natural sciences themselves, and courses in
mathematics and in the social sciences. Defining academic subjects in terms of
independent one-year courses is strictly an American practice. In this framework the
issues of the interrelationships of science, technology, and society can be given at best
some lip service in the physics class. In most countries of the world, physics and
chemistry are taught over several years. Structured sequences will have to come to the
U.S. too if we want to reverse the trend of replacing the study of science by a mere
memorization of vocabulary.
I mentioned earlier that at the beginning of the PSSC project, ETS provided a special test
of PSSC students. Without that arrangement few parents would have allowed their
children to take the course. Today few public schools will even look at any science
program that does not correlate exactly with the state standards because their students
will have to take state-mandated tests. These tests, as bad as they are, have become the
masters of science education. It is imperative that the tight grip of state standards be
loosened for good innovation to flourish.

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