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Education and outreach

Education and outreach

Putting new physics on the syllabus

12 Aug 2020 Niki Bell
Taken from the August 2020 issue of Physics World.

Niki Bell calls on physicists to insist that exam boards integrate modern discoveries into the education system

Peter Higgs at CERN

On 4 July 2012 the CERN particle-physics lab near Geneva announced the discovery of the Higgs boson. “I think we have it…but we are only at the beginning,” noted Rolf-Dieter Heuer, the then director-general of CERN, in front of a packed auditorium. When I heard those words, I felt a sense of awe and even got a lump in my throat as I watched Peter Higgs wipe away a tear as his theoretical construct from 50 years ago became reality. Then my smile slowly faded and I realized that my Thursday morning A-level physics students would be full of questions about the new discovery. As a geophysicist, my particle physics is entirely self-taught, so I knew that I had a challenge ahead of me. I spent the rest of that July evening researching and preparing my explanations to the expected questions.

The next day I answered the students with confidence. I used analogies that were accessible and not too simplistic. I was careful not to obscure the fact that there are still many unknowns yet to discover and my students were genuinely engaged. “Will the Higgs boson be on our exam?” they asked me. I reassured them that it would not be this year, but next year’s students would probably need to know about it. However, I was wrong.

Almost eight years later and I’m still wrong. Each year, my students ask me why the Higgs boson is missing from the syllabus and when will it be added. Today, the three major exam boards in the UK – AQA, Edexcel and OCR – are still yet to include the Higgs boson in their A-level physics curriculum. Particle physics in education appears to be stuck, which is frustrating because some of the most important recent work in physics has been in this field. Unfortunately, very little of it is making its way into A-level education.

Stuck in a rut

I have worked for a small exam board and gained some insight into the process of writing a new syllabus. This board provided qualifications to a handful of colleges around the UK and I consulted on a rewrite for the curriculum and managed to insist that the existence of the Higgs boson was at least acknowledged. I also amended the definition of the neutrino to include the fact that it had mass – a feat that was acknowledged by the 2015 Nobel Prize for Physics. These were small victories, but ones that could not grow beyond the reach of that small sphere of influence.

While I have no experience of larger exam boards or the processes of scrutiny and consultation that go on behind closed doors, I find myself questioning the efficacy of those panels. When reading a typical syllabus for an exam board, the first few pages tend to include a “why choose us?” section. It states that the exam board has conducted extensive work with a range of educational providers and employers to ensure that the content is inspiring and up-to-date, but I have never seen any mention of the involvement of professional physicists, researchers or industry professionals. They don’t appear to consult with anyone who has been actively working to expand knowledge and understanding in our field.

Science communicator Henry Reich, who created the minutephysics YouTube channel that is dedicated to communicating challenging science, penned an open letter in 2012 to the then US president Barack Obama highlighting this very issue. As Reich pointed out, the omission of discoveries after the mid-1800s means that US high-school physics completely overlooks much of the science that contributed to many of the technologies that the US should be proud of. We’re not quite in such a situation in the UK, but it is becoming increasingly so. Students in the UK are now finding that the Nobel Prize for Physics is seemingly less and less relevant to their everyday lives, when in fact, with the acceleration of technology, the opposite should be true.

Whose responsibility is it then to make sure that key discoveries are integrated into our education system? I would argue that in an ideal world, the onus should be on the exam boards to reach out. But failing this, the responsibility falls to physicists to lobby exam boards to help them understand that the gap is widening between what we now know and what we are teaching our young people.

My current students were only eight years old when the Higgs boson was discovered. When they come across it during a reading assignment, it is often a new concept to them. But because it is not on the exam they are not motivated to study it in any depth. Year on year, I notice that the number of students asking about the Higgs boson is decreasing so much that now, most new students haven’t heard of it.

That class from 2012 who asked me all those questions about the Higgs boson are now aged between 24 and 25. The news may well have inspired them to pursue a career in physics – they could even be working at CERN. But the classes I taught in subsequent years have been increasingly isolated from new discoveries from particle physics and beyond. My current students find it harder to see modern physics as the exciting and fast-moving topic that it is. Surely that must change.

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