Physics Education: Available supply matching anticipated demand

Abstract

The way to better blends in education is apparently long and difficult and requires a lot of reflections and discussions. Although we present some suggestions, the main purpose of this paper is to stimulate discussion on these issues.

1.Introduction

Physics is international. The Gauss theorem or Newton laws are valid everywhere. Problems of physics education are thus to a large extent international as well, although there are also national and regional traditions and differences in social and economical development what gives to physics education its regional and local aspects.

A large part of my personal experience in physics education is related to education in my own country of Slovakia and meetings and discussions with educationists in my and in neighbouring countries. Therefore some of the following statements, need not be applicable to countries with different traditions.

Physics education has been an underlying concern of many physicists and physics teachers. To give some idea of the problems identified by others as well as useful suggestions made for improvement I refer the reader to Refs. [1-4]. A nice collection ofpapers related to physics education can be found in Ref.[5], including among others some most interesting papers by Feynman [6] and Penzias [7]. A review of recent trends in undergraduate physics education has been presented by Black in Ref.[8].

I am convinced that the physics community should show greater interest in problems associated with physics education, both in general and in specific aspects. The specific ones contain proposals of curricula and new methods of teaching particular topics. General aspects concern in particular the question of objectives of physics education, long term strategies of teacher training, etc. In fact, as professional physicists and as physics teachers, we seldom speak about the aims and objectives of physics education. Partly, I suspect, because we consider these objectives as being somehow self- evident and partly because we try to avoid discussion on issues we do not understand at the level physicists are supposed to understand physics. But without discussing and understanding the objectives it is rather difficult to asses whether we are teaching well.

A working definition of objectives is frequently given as developing "standards" to which students have to meet. This entails defining what types of problems students are supposed to solve and what type of laboratory work they are supposed to perform. But there always remains a question, why "standards" or requirements for laboratory work are as they are, and from which more general objectives they have followed. I will try in this paper to suggest a possible approach to the formulation of the objectives of a balanced physics education.

At the first sight it might seem that at all levels the objectives of physics education are given by physics itself. I suspect that such an understanding, indeed prejudice, is the root of a large part of problems we are facing in physics education. There are no serious problems associated with determining the aims and objectives of those secondary school pupils who will later become university undergraduates in physics or physics related subjects and, perhaps even, carry on to Ph.D. level and who will eventually work as research physicists. But there is a serious problem of what learning physics could and should give to those who will not become professional physicists. As pointed out in Ref.[8] on the basis of statistics from USA and UK even out of students who take undergraduate physics courses only a very small fraction will become professional physicists. This fraction is much, much smaller for those pupils who study physics at secondary schools.

I believe that the purpose of education in general and of physics in particular is to give to young people something what will be useful for their lives. Such a formulation of objectives is not particularly new, but if taken seriously it leads immediately to two questions:
- what is the community of physicists able to offer to the younger generation or phrasing it otherwise, what is the supply? - what is the demand, that means what our present pupils and students will need most in their lives when their physics education is over?

I shall attempt to analyse these two questions below, in Sect.2 I will analyse the Supply, in Sect.3 the Demand. In Sect.4. I will look at ways of marrying the two problems. Comments and conclusions will be presented in Sect.5.

2. The potential and the available supply

In his introductory course of Physics Orear [9] defines Physics as that what physicists are doing at night. Anybody who has spent much of his time by teaching, sitting in on meetings and committees and has done some administration will readily appreciate this definition.

In this sense physics is about deep thinking and research. But in contradistinction to this point of view, in what follows, I will understand Physics as simply meaning all that what physicists know, and what they are doing, including their research, preparation and presentation of talks at seminars, participation in discussions at seminars and elsewhere, proposing experiments, lecturing, working in committees, refereeing papers and proposals of experiments, doing administration, their knowledge of history of physics etc.

The potential supply of the community of physicists for physics education includes knowledge, methods, experience and expertise in all of these activities. The potential supply is in fact even broader since there are also people from other professions, e.g. psychologists and educationalists, who cooperate with physicists in particular in teacher training.

The available supply at a given time is more narrow and includes that what and how physics teachers at universities and secondary schools are able to teach. Obviously, parts of the potential supply can be transferred with some effort and within a certain time to the available supply.

This is meant in the following way: the community of physicists has experience and expertise in many activities which do not make part of physics education. Just as a single example consider a proposal of an experiment and procedures of its assessment and eventually approval. Physics community knows how to do that, but most of teachers whether in undergraduate courses or in secondary schools do not have this experience and are unable to include that into the physics education. It is possible to include that into the training of future physics teachers or into the in-service training, to prepare a set of case studies and in this way to transfer these skills from the potential to the available supply.

The potential supply is huge and it is impossible to make easily a complete list. I shall try to list here at least some items, dividing the potential supply into four, somewhat overlapping, groups.

a) Knowledge and understanding - concepts and laws of physics, inter - connections between different fields of physics, providing a feeling of a unity of physics, experimental and theoretical tools, computing and networking, history of physics.

b) Methods, skills, approaches, abilities

- theoretical methods, experimental methods, methods of data handling, ability to get oriented in a problem by looking for relevant variables and their connections, making qualitative estimates, (e.g. so called Fermi problems),
- proposing hypotheses and ways how to justify or disprove them, feeling of a problem or inconsistencyproposing experiments (a very important part of this belongs to the next group), evaluating results ( also partly the next group)

c) Communication, organisation, administration
- the classical and very efficient way of communication are seminars, followed by discussions. Seminars have their own culture which can be trained. Seminars are extremely useful. (It is well known that Oppenheimer insisted on keeping seminars even in the highly classified Manhattan project.)
- discussions within smaller or larger groups at group meetings
- informal discussions procedures starting with the idea and leading up to the approval of a technical project of an experiment. This includes Letter of Intent, assessment by committees, preparation of proposals at different stages, discussions, assessments, financial analyses (quite similar to the cost- benefit analyses used in many other fields), tenders for industry, co-operation with the industry, sometimes transfer of technology to industry, writing papers, reports, posters, preparing transparencies, writing up grant proposals.

d) Personal features, attitudes
Note that this is a field where co-operation with psychologists, educationalists and perhaps others is desirable and fruitful.
This includes among others:
- scepticism to authorities
- belief in one's own abilities to orient oneself in a problem
- perseverance ( appreciated by the community)
- eativity and inventiveness ( highly appreciated by the community )
- ability to evaluate something
- atitudes of a problem solver
- appreciation of work of others ( seen e.g. in the pressure of community to cite correctly the work of others)
- positive attitude to discussions, analyses, etc.
- sense for humour, appreciation of humour

e) General education, culture, understanding how the socierty works
This point is probably more related to the Central European experience, where prior to 1989 a systematic education in Marxism was a compulsory part of any university education. This has been followed by the period where there has been no education in philosophy, sociology and humanities in studies of natural sciences, physics and engineering. Only since recently the need is felt again and some education in humanities is coming also to these types of study. The need for this type of education has at least two reasons:

Firstly, the current rates of enrolment at undergraduate university studies are almost surely higher than rates of enrolment in high schools at the beginning of this century. The general character of education at high schools has never been seriously questioned, and the need of general educational character of undergraduate university education follows not only from the high enrolment rates, but also from statistics of jobs taken by students.

Secondly, orientation in the functioning of society is becoming increasingly important because of increasing complexity of various projects in physics and in other fields, e.g. ecology, medicine, education etc. where physicists participate.

Formulation of exhaustive lists such as the attempt above is rather difficult, if at all possible. It is sometimes questionable whether an item should be included or not.

The emphasis in physics education is mostly placed on the first group (knowledge and understanding), somewhat less emphasis is placed on the second group (methods, approaches, skills, abilities) and those in the remaining groups enter only marginally, in spite of there importance.

But outside of regular education they do enter. Example is e.g. the competition in physics for secondary school students, "The Tournament of Young Physicists", a competition in which participate groups of students, each group playing in turn roles of people carrying research, referees, and a group representing the Editors. Problems are not typical end-of-chapter ones and they usually require some experimental or/and theoretical research and analysis and interpretation of results. As far as I know such approaches are rarely used in regular education.

It is believed that the regular methods of physics education are most efficient for transferring the knowledge of laws, concepts and methods, although the results have been criticised by in depth analysis of the situation, see Refs.[1,2,3,4,10]. The promotion of items in the 3rd and 4th group can probably be achieved only by introducing non- traditional elements into the education, for example case studies (used frequently in humanities, education in public administration, economics, etc.), discussions over presented results or video tapes, essay writing, etc.

3. The anticipated demand

It is rather difficult to anticipate the demand in physics education, partly because we do not know what our present students will do after having finished high school or undergraduate university studies and especially because we are living in a rapidly changing world . According to statistics based on US and UK data, quoted by P. Black [8] in a summary of the IUPAP Int. Conference on Pregraduate Physics Education, Maryland, August 1996, only 30 % of students taking calculus - level introductory physics course become professional physicists; remaining 70% take jobs in other fields or continues their studies in another natural science, or in medicine, engineering, new technologies, business, law, etc..

In Central Europe there are no similar statistics since 1990, but if available, they would probably show a similar or even larger percentage of students taking introductory calculus - level physics courses and finding jobs outside of physics, for example in banks, newly founded small and medium size - companies, administration, etc..

Taking into account that majority of those who take introductory physics courses will not work as research physicists, indicates that physics should be taught in a way which brings something useful to those students. And from the potential supply discussed above, this is not a superficial knowledge of physics concepts and laws, but rather those parts which do have a broader field of applications, that means items (c) - (e) above.

The second problem is that our world is rapidly changing beyond belief and that types of jobs available today may be rather different than the demand in 20, 30 or 40 years time. In the context of physics education the rapid changes of the World has been discussed e.g. by George Marx in Ref.[11].

Fig. 1
Evolution of the employment in Germany in the period 1800 - 2000. Estimates by L. A. Nefiodov, Institut fuer Arbeitsmarkt und Berufsforschung.

A good illustration of rapid changes in the recent past can be seen in Fig.1, giving the evolution of the structure of employment in Germany from about 1800 to 2000. But there are many other illustrations of the rapid development and its only partial predictability.

As cited by M. Rees [12] in 1937 the US National Academy of Science carried out a study for president Roosevelt, aimed at predicting scientific breakthroughs in the future. They have predicted correctly developments in agriculture, synthetic gasoline and synthetic rubber, but they have missed nuclear energy and nuclear bombs, development and broad use of antibiotics, transistors and computers. Thus the commitee has missed the technological developments that have dominated the post-war era.

Some people have dared to make predictions for the next century and their visions highlight some surprising points. An excellent example of such an attempt is the paper by P. Creola [13] concerning the Space Physics and Technology.

It would be useful and most interesting to know how will the economical globalization of some areas, new technologies, computer networks and other factors change the way of life on our planet within 20 - 40 years, but really reliable predictions are obviously not available. This uncertainty of the future leads again, in my opinion, to the importance of items (c) - (e) as listed above. Concerning (a), the extend of knowledge will be probably less important than the depth of understanding, because understanding also implies a feeling of what understanding is and how it can be achieved and a feeling of when the problem is (or is not) understood. It seems that here is a strong point of physics, physicists and physics teachers.

The central issue in discussing the demand is who will determine the demand. In our opinion this should be decided by consensus reached by a body consisting of people able to anticipate - to the extend possible - the evolution of the society and the jobs and future activities of the present students, physicists and physics teachers and those concerned: the students and their parents, psychologists, educationists, past students and their employers.

4. Matching the supply and the demand

Potential supply may be approximately described - a very incomplete list has been given above in Sect.2. To specify the demand is certainly much more complicated. A certain approximation may follow from the consensus reached within a body mentioned a few lines above.

During discussions in such bodies it would be very useful to keep in mind that the objectives in physics education are complementary in the sense similar to that used in quantum mechanics. (The point has been discussed in Ref.[14]). We shall now present a few pairs of complementary objectives in physics education.

The list of complementary pairs can be made longer, we make no attempt to make it complete. A brief glance at the list shows that the left member of the pair is related to possibly superficial knowledge whereas the one at right hand side is related either to a possibility of a "deeper" knowledge or to one of the issues (b) - (e) in Sect.2.

Although at present we do not have and cannot have finished recipes how to teach undergraduate and high school physics, we guess that the emphasis should be rather put on those teaching strategies which use the available supply to promote the right hand sides of the complementary possibilities.

Quite frequently students in undergraduate physics courses and in high schools find physics uninteresting. On the contrary active physicists claim that physics is most interesting and they value highly discussions with colleagues in physics seminars and other meetings of physicists.

The reason is probably that they are speaking about another physics. We should rather avoid this separation and give opportunity to students to enjoy that physics we like.

5.Comments and conclusions

Physics education at any level is a service to pupils and students. In my region of the world where strong central state has been present for a long time it has been offend felt by students as something imposed "from above".

When physics education is understood as a service than it is surprising why physics, in particular at high schools and in pregradute education belongs to subjects which are not popular among students. In order to make the service better we need to understand a lot of things better than we do now, including the ways students learn and what they need for their lives in the society whose evolution is difficult to predict.

The classic phrase says that education is what remains when all details have been forgotten. But what is not forgotten in this case are the attitudes, values, habits of communication, etc., that means those parts of physics education the emphasis is usually not put upon.

Psychologists have recently analysed different types of intelligence, see e.g. Refs.[16-18]. Perhaps the attitudes of physicists to problem solving, our ways of communication, our system of values etc. show something which could be included into physics education. In the opinion of psychologists, the education can influence the type of intelligence as measured by the standards of IQ tests only to a limited extend, whereas the other types of intelligence can be influenced more. This gives some encouragement also to physics education.

I believe that the possible supply of physics community is much broader than what physics is nowadays presenting and that we should seriously occupy ourselves with the question of what is the demand and how to match it with the supply. When deciding in favour of attitudes, values, ways of communication, etc. we have to take into account the complementarity of objectives and leave some topics out.

Acknowledgements

I am indebted to Dr. Ivan Slade and to Dr. Václav Koubek for numerous valuable comments to the preliminary version of the paper, to Dr. K. H. Chang from the Foundation for Fundamental Research on Matter, The Netherlands for Fig.1 and to Dr. M. Jurčová for cooperation in a study of development of students' creativity by solving physics problems.

References