PHYSICS

How the teachers and students talk about physics?

How the teachers and students talk about physics?

Introduction

In ancient Greece, physics was originally known as natural philosophy. The word philosophy itself stems from the Greek “philos” - love or lover, and “sophos” - wise or wisdom; thus the literal translation of philosophy is “lover of wisdom” (Amabile, 1996, p. 54). Physics, therefore, could be something looked at with admiration; it is the love of the wisdom of nature. Unfortunately, there seems to be a trend in the opposite direction. From the Greek “phobos” it appears that a general “physics phobia” may exist within our society. Perhaps phobia is too strong a term, but from my experience as a high school physics teacher, I can attest that many high school students are afraid of physics. What they are afraid of is what they perceive the difficulty of physics to be. This perception is shaped by a variety of sources including parents, family, friends, and even teachers. However, this perception may not be accurate; in fact, it may not be accurate at all.

The impact that this negative perception can have on high school physics enrolment and in turn the effect that a less scientifically literate populus has on a society is the cause of my concern. As a high school physics teacher I have noted that there are far fewer students taking physics than the other sciences at the high school level (Walberg, 1973, p. 187). It could be assumed that this is due to a lack of the necessary math skills; this however is not the major issue since just as many students complete the highest level math classes as chemistry and biology (Taconis, 2009, p. 1115). There does seem, however, to be a consensus among students (and people in general, including teachers) that physics is a very difficult subject.

Literature Review

In order to put the issue of female participation in Physics and Chemistry into context, it is useful to consider the international trends. Since the 1970s a number of international comparisons of girls' and boys' achievements in science have been conducted. The earliest of these indicated that boys achieved better than girls in all branches of science at ages ten and fourteen, and at pre-university level. Studies also showed that while girls were more likely to take Biology as a subject, they were a lot less likely than boys to take Physics, Chemistry or Higher Mathematics. A recent international comparison focused on the performance of girls and boys in science at agethirteen. This study indicated that in most of the countries participating, 13 year old boys performed significantly better than girls of that age. This significant gender difference in performance was observed in Ireland, as well as in most of the other participating countries (Smith, 1978, p. 1263). This difference was observed in spite of the fact that in Ireland, as in the majority of countries, most students had positive attitudes to science and agreed with the statement that 'science is important for boys ...