An inquiry into the reproduction of physics-phobic children by physics-phobic teachers

Abstract

Recently in the authors' country Japan, the unpopularity of natural science among children has been a serious problem. Especially, physics is unpopular because physics requires mathematics. One of the reasons of this problem is that teachers themselves do not like physics. We focus our attention on the ``teachers in embryo'', namely the undergraduate students in a course for school teachers. We conducted a questionnaire and a quiz on the undergraduate students in the first grade of the Department of Science Education, Ibaraki University. We report the result of the questionnaire and the quiz, and also make suggestions to improve the present situation.

Latex 13 pages; English translation of the original version written in Japanese, Bulletin of Faculty of Education, Ibaraki University 56 (2007) 91-102, which can be downloaded from the website of ROSE (Repository of Open access Scholarly E-collections, Ibaraki University): http://ir.lib.ibaraki.ac.jp/handle/10109/38 (v2) layout modified