Learning Difficulties in High School Physics
Dr. Semih Aydin
Tishk International University
[email protected]
Physics is a basic science for understanding life, earth, space, and technology. It deals with complex equations, experimentations, many laws and technology. Therefore it includes complexities. Despite its importance, physics is found as one the difficult subjects in high school curriculum. Because of this, it remains the least favored science among the other subjects. Compared to other science subjects, physics is not appreciated well enough, and few students choose to study physics at the university level. The main purpose of this study was to find out the
difficulties in learning physics in high school. The study explored problems in learning physics from the following perspectives: problems related to school facilities, physics teachers, students’ understanding. Usually, physics in high school are taught by teachers who specialize in physics. Researchers are increasingly searching out the reasons why students avoid physics in high school years. Learning difficulties vary from student to student, from school to school depending upon many factors such as school’s infrastructures and teachers` quality. According to the results most of the students mentioned that they “love physics”, but students’ interest lessens in physics by the end of high school years. The level of the background of students in mathematics, lack of school facilities such as physics labs, physics equipment, and digital technologies, quality of physics course books, teaching methods of physics teachers, lack of physics teaching materials are some major difficulties in learning high school physics. In this
study, a descriptive survey method was used and samples were collected from 150 university
students from 4 different departments including grades from 1st year to 4th year.
Keywords: Learning Difficulties, Physics, school facilities, physics teachers, students’ understanding.
doi:10.23918/vesal2021v39