The Role of Experiment in Physics Education: Attitudes of Upper Secondary School Students

Abstract The paper presents a segment of results obtained within a large study among Czech upper secondary students, whose general aim is to describe teachers’ and students’ views of physics experiments (and/or experimenting as such). The participants ( N = 1,325) were asked closed questions concerning how they perceive experiments in physics lessons, how these lessons would look like without experiments and what is the respondents’ personal relation to physics experiments (not necessarily in the school context). Our results show that most often experiments are perceived as an enlivening element in physics lessons, a help with understanding the subject matter and an interesting complement to theory. On the other hand, only a minority of students perceive experiments as a tool physics uses to obtain new information about the world. Around half of the respondents admit that most of their physics lessons would not be affected in any way if experiments were removed. Concerning gender comparison, we found only rare differences at p < 0.05. Similarly, the answers were usually homogeneous across respondents’ year of study; the exceptions are discussed in the paper.