Gender response to Einsteinian physics interventions in School

Kaur, Tejinder; Blair, David; Choudhary, Rahul; Dua, Yohanes Sudarmo; Foppoli, Alexander; Zadnik, Marjan

doi:10.48550/arxiv.1712.06323

Cited by 2 publications

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“…There is significant evidence that girls respond more positively compared to boys. We cannot determine whether this is due to the nature of the material or the activity based learning, which has previously been shown to encourage female improvement [33]. Hence this program can be used as an effective case study to create longer interventions for further implementation of Einsteinian physics.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 94%

Can a short intervention focused on gravitational waves and quantum physics improve students’ understanding and attitude?

et al. 2018

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The decline in students' interest in science and technology is a major concern in the western world. One approach to reversing this decline is to introduce modern physics concepts much earlier in the school curriculum. We have used the context of the recent discoveries of gravitational waves to test benefits of one-day interventions, in which students are introduced to the ongoing nature of scientific discovery, as well as the fundamental concepts of quantum physics and gravitation, which underpin these discoveries. Our innovative approach combines role-playing, model demonstrations, single photon interference and gravitational wave detection, plus simple experiments designed to emphasize the quantum interpretation of interference. We compare understanding and attitudes through pre and post testing on four age groups (school years 7, 8, 9 and 10), and compare results with those of longer interventions with Year 9. Results indicate that neither prior knowledge nor age are significant factors in student understanding of the core concepts of Einsteinian physics. However we find that the short interventions are insufficient to enable students to comprehend more derived concepts.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 94%

Can a short intervention focused on gravitational waves and quantum physics improve students’ understanding and attitude?

et al. 2018

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“…These theories are important not only because of the change they provoked in the paradigm of physics, but also for their applications which have a huge impact on everyday life, but are generally beyond the grasp of the great majority of citizens. Recent results show that it is possible and also effective to introduce modern physics early in schools: the Einstein First project [4,6,[9][10][11][12][13]17] aims to develop learning sequences on modern physics as early as the primary school years. According to this approach, the introduction of language and concepts of the modern understanding of space, time, matter and radiation at an early age could prevent conceptual conflicts between Newtonian physics and Euclidean geometry (that are commonly taught at school) and the completely different paradigms of modern physics.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Physics for the masses: teaching Einsteinian gravity in primary school

2021

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Why is modern physics still today, more than 100 years after its birth, the privilege of an elite of scientists and unknown for the great majority of citizens? The answer is simple, since modern physics is in general not present in the standard physics curricula, except for some general outlines, in the final years of some secondary schools. But, is it possible to teach modern physics in primary school? Is it effective? and, also, Is it engaging for students? These are the simple questions which stimulated our research, based on an intervention performed in the last year of Italian primary school, focused on teaching gravity, according to the Einsteinian approach in the spirit of the Einstein First project, an international collaboration which aims to teach school age children the concepts of modern physics. The outcomes of our research study are in agreement with previous findings obtained in Australian schools, thus they contribute to validate them and show that there is no cultural effect, since the approach works in different education systems. Finally, our results are relevant also in terms of retention and prove that the students involved really understand the key ideas.

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Gender response to Einsteinian physics interventions in School

Cited by 2 publications

References 0 publications

Can a short intervention focused on gravitational waves and quantum physics improve students’ understanding and attitude?

Can a short intervention focused on gravitational waves and quantum physics improve students’ understanding and attitude?

Physics for the masses: teaching Einsteinian gravity in primary school

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