Abstract
This article addresses physics teachers’ views about physics teaching in upper-secondary school. Their views have been investigated nationwide through a web-based questionnaire. The questionnaire has been developed based on several published instruments and is part of an ongoing project on the role of mathematics in physics teaching at upper-secondary school. The selected part of the results from the analysis of the questionnaire reported on here cross-correlate physics teachers’ views about aims of physics teaching with their view of physics classroom activities, and perceived hindrances in the teaching of physics. Three hundred seventy-nine teachers responded to the questionnaire (45% response rate). The result indicates that teachers with a high agreement with a Fundamental Physics curriculum emphasis regarded mathematics as a problem for physics teaching, whereas teachers with high agreement with the curriculum emphases Physics, Technology and Society or Knowledge Development in Physics did not do so. This means that teachers with a main focus on fundamental theories and concepts believe that mathematics is a problem to a higher extent than teachers with main focus on the role of physics in society and applied aspects or physics knowledge development do. Consequences for teaching and further research are discussed.
Highlights
Introduction and Theoretical FrameworkScience teaching, chemistry and physics teaching, is subject to ongoing discussions concerning aims, goals, relation to modern society and ways of teaching so that more students find physics interesting and meaningful
We report on upper-secondary physics teachers’ views on aims, characteristics and challenges related to physics teaching and their teaching habits, in relation to their attitudes to physics and mathematics
Based on a dimension reduction by factors (PCA, with varimax rotation, Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin measure of sampling adequacy (KMO) = 0.83), two items were excluded from the further analysis since their main contributions were in relation to another scale than theoretically expected
Summary
Introduction and Theoretical FrameworkScience teaching, chemistry and physics teaching, is subject to ongoing discussions concerning aims, goals, relation to modern society and ways of teaching so that more students find physics interesting and meaningful. Different science teaching traditions have previously been described in the literature. The goal of science teaching in this teaching tradition is that ‘students have to memorize scientific knowledge and procedures within the structure that was established’ There are other teaching traditions such as ‘progressive school science’ and ‘critical school science’ in which the goals of school science are more related to citizenship. In line with such different foci and aims of school science, Roberts (1982, 1988, 1995) introduced the concept of ‘curriculum emphases’ defined as:
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