Secondary Students’ Understanding of Basic Ideas of Special Relativity

Abstract

A major topic that has marked ‘modern physics’ is the theory of special relativity (TSR). The present work focuses on the possibility of teaching the basic ideas of the TSR to students at the upper secondary level in such a way that they are able to understand and learn the ideas. Its aim is to investigate students' learning processes towards the two axioms of the theory (the principle of relativity and the invariance of the speed of light) and their consequences (the relativity of simultaneity, time dilation and length contraction). Based on an analysis of physics college textbooks, on a review of the relevant bibliography and on a pilot study, a teaching and learning sequence consisting of five sessions was developed. To collect the data, experimental interviews (the so-called teaching experiment) were used. The teaching experiment may be viewed as a Piagetian clinical interview that is deliberately employed as a teaching and learning situation. The sample consisted of 40 10th grade students (aged 15–16). The data were collected by taping and transcribing the ‘interviews’, as well as from two open-ended questionnaires filled out by each student, one before and the other after the sessions. Methods of qualitative content analysis were applied. The results show that upper secondary education students are able to cope with the basic ideas of the TSR, but there are some difficulties caused by the following student conceptions: (a) there is an absolute frame of reference, (b) objects have fixed properties and (c) the way events happen is independent of what the observers perceive.

Keywords:

• Upper secondary school
• Physics education
• Qualitative research
• Theory of special relativity
• Learning processes
• Teaching experiment

Notes

Most of these textbooks have been translated into Greek. The only exception is the ‘Spacetime Physics’ (Textbook 7). Taken into account though it is considered as a reference book (e.g. Borghi et al., 1993), we decided to include it in the analysis.

This is, of course, a basic assumption that holds on the grounds of special relativity. Maybe in the future, it will have to be revised.

With the capital letters A–J, we characterize the groups of students, and with the numbers 1–4, we characterize the members of each group.