Abstract:

Education in the Czech Republic, which naturally includes secondary school education, was of a high standard for many years, which was mainly enabled by a very well-elaborated curricular plan with a so-called cyclical system of learning content. Curricula were developed into individual thematic units and a suitable didactic method and teaching materials were suggested by experts. At present, these curricula with a so-called ‘large amount of learning content’ are outdated. It is emphasised that pupils should not only learn and be able to reproduce the learning content, but they should also understand it and use it in practice. Despite these aims and efforts, PISA, TIMSS observes that education in the Czech Republic is in decline.

The forthcoming social period is often termed ‘Industry 4.0’. It is an emerging social phase in which automation and information technologies should penetrate all areas of human existence. Supposedly, changes will be reflected in the socio-cultural, scientific and technological spheres of life. According to experts, the young generation, in particular, should be prepared for the above-mentioned situation and they should be educated in accordance with this idea, especially in technical subjects, Maths and Physics, at secondary schools. The effort to carry out this vision is mainly obvious in the use of many modern digital technologies in teaching. It is expected that it will make the preparation in accordance with the didactic principles easier for teachers, it will excite pupils’ interest in the learning content, it will enhance their attention and concentration, it will facilitate a correct understanding of the learning content and it will develop their computer literacy at the same time.

On the other hand, a lot of questions emerge in this context. Do these ‘technological advances’ really help secondary school students achieve better study results? Can it happen that despite experts and teachers’ efforts, it will not work? And what about the ideas about the basic physical concepts from the field of mechanics and thermal physics of secondary school graduates from general education schools or from vocational schools who are in their first year of Bachelor’s studies at Vysoká škola báňská - Technical University of Ostrava? Are their ideas related to the given learning topic correct or did they adopt misconceptions (mistaken or completely erroneous ideas) about concepts? These are the questions which we asked at the beginning of our research. To acquire data, we decided to use a test of knowledge from the field of mechanics and thermal physics in 27 university students studying in their first year of Bachelor’s studies at Vysoká škola báňská - Technical University of Ostrava, Faculty of Mechanical Engineering. The knowledge test included 9 mechanics tasks and 8 tasks from the thermodynamics, where the correct solution of each task required non-trivial physics knowledge. Data thus acquired were processed by a statistic method for the analysis of metric data, i.e. a Student t-test or Mann-Whitney test. The research results show that there are physics misconceptions among students in different levels, especially in the area of thermodynamics. Differences between men and women also emerged, with women experiencing greater problems in understanding physics laws.

Keywords:

Misconception, thermal physics, physics, educational process, secondary school graduates.