Analysis of knowledge of contemporary physics topics of first-year students of the Faculty of Education, University of Ljubljana

Sometimes we are not aware, but there is always a research going on in natural science related to new topics that have often a significant impact on our daily lives later. Future teachers will have to lecture on contemporary physics topics, they first hear about at the university or not even there. A lot of contemporary natural science is not yet included in a school curriculum, although we use the results every day. In this master’s degree we analysed a survey of the 1st year students from the University of Ljubljana, Faculty of Education attending all programs. We tried to establish the knowledge of selected contemporary physics topics: hydrogels, microwaves, colours in LCDs and the polarization of light. We found out how the knowledge differs between attendees in different study programmes and found that the students of “Two – subjects teachers” programme achieved better results than students of other programs. We investigated where students got the information about these topics in spite the fact, that they are not included in their school curriculums they absolved so far. Non the less – the most common source still remains school, followed by television and the Web. We investigated also how following the news related to natural sciences through television, online articles, Wikipedia and books affects their knowledge on contemporary physics topics. It turns out that those who follow these sources more frequently did not achieve demonstrated better knowledge. We also investigated if students who estimate their knowledge on contemporary physics topics as “high” also scored higher results and we found out that they actually do. However, in summary we can conclude that the knowledge of students of all programs on contemporary topics is very low and inadequate