UNDERSTANDING FIRST YEAR UNIVERSITY STUDENTS' CURIOSITY AND INTEREST ABOUT PHYSICS

The European shortage of students pursuing further studies and careers in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) is particularly severe in the field of physical sciences. Many physics departments suffer from high dropout rates, partly caused by students' decrease of interest during their studies. To address these problems and to help teachers at all educational levels improve their practices, the EU-funded HOPE (Horizons in Physics Education) project examined the views of first-year Physics students in European universities. Here we report the results of an interview study on how students perceive their reasons for choosing physics as their field of study. 94 semi-structured interviews were conducted in 16 universities and analysed through a two-round process. The results show that the first-year students used chiefly expressions of interest and intrinsic motivation to describe factors inspiring them to study physics, while expectations of success as well as utility and attainment values played smaller roles. The interviewees were either strongly motivated by their curiosity in understanding how the world works, or interested in what characterises physics as knowledge (its practises, methods, and way of knowing and thinking). Often both aspects were present. The division in subcategories shed more light on the precise nature of such curiosities and interests. We will discuss these tendencies using exemplary quotes, and contrast our results with earlier research. We suggest the articulated picture of interest and curiosity built in this study could inform the development of first year Physics courses - both the choice of contents and pedagogical approaches. Results can also be useful for designing targeted recruitment and outreach initiatives, which aim to foster interest in physics at pre-college levels.