The reasons for the relative unpopularity of physics as a high school subject have been the subject of several articles during the past few years. It may be that interest in the relative popularity of physics is presently slackening due to the apparent oversupply of professional physicists and engineers following the cutback of employment in Federal programs. Nevertheless, the purpose of this article is to suggest an additional reason for this unpopularity.In a study recently carried out in nine Connecticut high schools, certain attitudes possessed by senior students who had elected high school physics were compared to those possessed by academically capable senior students who had elected to not take physics. The words "academically capable" identified students who had demonstrated sufficient academic ability to have taken physics in high school if that had been their choice. The word "elected75 was given an operational definition based on the students response on a particular scale. A "Freedom of Choice" response scale was incorporated in the attitude instrument to separate the students who had either elected to take or to not take physics from the group of students who were either scheduled into physics or were not scheduled into physics through no act of volition of their own. It was the student responses on the "Freedom of Choice" scale which prompted this discussion.There was no original intention to use the responses to the "Freedom of Choice" scale for any purpose except to identify those students who had "elected" their schedules. The responses on this item by the groups of physics and non-physics students, however, were so different that they merit further attention. In five of the nine schools the group of physics students indicated a freedom of choice that was significantly lower (P<0.05) than that indicated by the non-physics students.A test-retest reliability was computed for the attitude instrument. With an N of 43, the reliability of the responses to the "Freedom of Choice" item was 0.39. The intervening time lapse between administrations was three weeks. The result is significant at the .01 level of probability. Table I is a tabulation of the total response to the scale. Table II is a comparison of the responses of the physics and nonphysics students.Clearly, the group of physics students included a large number of students who did not elect physics. In the sample from the nine 283
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