New trends in physics teaching, v.4; The ... - unesdoc - Unesco

New Trends in Physics Teaching IV
How to overcome the dilemma of physics education
D. NACHTIGALL.
THE PRESENT SITUATION OF PHYSICS EDUCATION
One of the most prominent physics teachers of our day, the first recipient of the ICPE Medal for
Physics Teaching, Eric M. Rogers, describes the motivational starting position of science teachers
for their daily work at school or college as follows [ 11 : ‘Those of us who teach usually trust
optimistically that what we say to students wil be learned, that what we show will be remembered,
that the methods we demonstrate will be applied, that the values we preach will be appreciated:
in general, that all our didactic output wil go to build an edifice of education that will last our
pupils all their lives.’ But, he continues: ‘Students remember some of the material issued to them
- but we wonder how much they remember and how long they remember; and we wonder what
form later memories take. . . . Only for a few does our elementary teaching of science in school
or college build a basis for intellectual growth or technological use.’
Other physics teachers have similar impressions about the outcome of the activities of science
teaching. In physics, especially, the situation is considered to be highly unsatisfactory. At the
International Conference on Physics Education, 1975 in Edinburgh, P. Black [ 21 stated: ‘There
is evidence that students studying sophisticated physics often have a poor understanding of basic
concepts.’ Graduates for entry to M.Sc. courses ‘ . . . often make gross errors in the simple
qualitative description of processes and topics of which their courses had included detailed study.’
Asking ‘questions testing understanding of the basic concepts of Newtonian mechanics to
university physics students in their first and third years, the results were uniformly poor, the
only difference between the two groups being that first year students justified their errors with
qualitative arguments whereas third year students used formal and mathematical language to
explain the same mistakes.’
At the same conference, J. Ogborn [3] specified his four worries about students coming to
university: ‘they do not know enough; they do not understand what they know; they do not
understand what physics is and how it works, and they are unable to learn effectively by themselves.’
Five years later, at the 1980 ICPE Conference in Trieste, the situation was considered to be no
better. In the conference report [4], the following despairing cries were recorded: ‘Physics-
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