Gifted Students' Perception of Fundamental Physical Constants

Abstract

Fundamental physical constants are very important for the study of and the research in physics. However, their importances have not been considered in physics education for a long time. In this paper, to investigate gifted-students’ perceptions of fundamental physical constants quantitatively, we improved the inventory and applied it to 263 gifted students in physics, who participated in the summer camp of the Korea Physics Olympiad (KPhO) 2011. The new inventory was developed for 10 constants, with six information dimensions for each constant. The six dimensions are as follows: significant digit, order of magnitude, unit, dimension, experiment or related history, and physical meaning. Among the fundamental physical constants, the speed of light and Avogadro’s number were the most highly perceived constants while Rydburg’s constant was the lowest. In the analysis of the correlations among the dimensions, significant digit was highly correlated with order of magnitude, and dimension was correlated with unit except for the elementary charge (e) and Aavogadro’s constant (NA). Experiment or related history was not correlated with any of the other dimensions. We conclude that gifted students merely consider a fundamental physical constant to be a tool or a constant to solve physics problems.