Physics Education research is a young field with a strong tradition in many countries. However, it has only recently received full recognition of its specificity and relevance for the growth and improvement of the culture of Physics in contemporary Society for different levels and populations.

This may be due on one side to the fact that teaching, therefore education, is part of the job of university researchers (whatever their research field) and it has often been implicitly assumed (not always correctly) that the competences required for good research activity also guarantee good teaching practice.

On the other side, and perhaps more important, is the fact that the problems to be afforded in doing research in education are complex problems that require a knowledge base not restricted to the disciplinary physics knowledge but enlarged to include cognitive science, communication science, history and philosophy.

This complexity is partially conveyed in the organization of this School. The themes of the lectures presented in the Course and reproduced in these Proceedings look at some of the facets of the problem by considering the interplay of the development of cognitive models for learning Physics (Redish, diSessa, Hammer, Otero) with some reflections on the Physics contents for contemporary and future society (Vicentini, Guidoni) with the analysis of teaching strategies (Viennot, Mestre, Thornton, Heron) and the role of experiments (Euler, Pintó), the issue of assessment (Black) and cultural aspects (Grimellini).

Information was also given on the organizations involved in connecting various aspects of Physics Education: the International Commission on Physics Education (Sahm), the European Physical Society (Tibell), the European Physics Education Network (Ferdinande).

During the School a poster session was organized and some of the students presented their work. A small number of the poster presentations is also reproduced in the Proceedings and we end with a report on the Round Table final discussion where the facets of the problem were critically examined in the perspective of the convergence of future research lines.

We thank the Italian Physical Society for giving us the opportunity to present to Physicists at large our research field and we hope that some of the results will be useful to them in their university teaching.

E. F. (JOE) Redish and M. Vicentini