How Do Students Perceive the Difficulty of Physics in Secondary School? An Exploratory Study in Nigeria

This study aimed at identifying the areas of physics that students considered as posing difficulty and what account for this difficulty. A questionnaire was administered to 830 (306 females and 524 males) final year students in science class and 52 physics teachers purposively drawn from secondary schools in Ogun and Lagos States, Nigeria. The findings show three major sources of difficulty in learning physics as related: nature of subject, teaching/teacher factors and curriculum/assessment.. Students were found to have difficulty understanding specific topics in the curriculum that are usually characterized as lacking concrete examples and requiring a lot of mathematical manipulations or visualization. Many also found difficult the tasks of solving problems alone and asking questions in class. The findings have implications for designing interventions and identifying pedagogical techniques that help students overcome the underlying sources of difficulty that impede quality learning.