Comparison between Israeli and Hungarian high school physics teachers’ attitudes towards general relativity assimilation in the curriculum

Abstract

On the assumption that any successful change on the curriculum is largely dependent on teachers being positive about it, we assessed and compared among 134 physics high school teachers’ attitudes towards general relativity assimilation in the curriculum by an online questionnaire, 71 from Israel and 63 from Hungary. We assessed and compared five issues related to pedagogical knowledge and content knowledge: degree of past and current GR knowledge, expectations of obstacles in implementing GR in the classroom, degree of importance teaching GR as mandatory, degree of importance teaching GR as internal elective and coping with mathematics difficulty. The results showed that teachers in both countries think that teaching general relativity in high school, has obstacles like lack of time and content knowledge. However, the high level of general relativity mathematics is not an obstacle in teaching general relativity.