An Investigation of Difficult Topics Encountered by Students in Interaction of Matter, Space and Time in Senior Secondary School Physics Curriculum

Despite the description of curriculum on what, why and how well students should learn in a systematic way. Physics curriculum has not been said to have actualize such description when compared with students’ performance in physics. The performance of students in physics has been on the decline over the years. Decline in Physics students’ performance as highlighted by the chief WAEC examiners report should not be a thing of neglect by both teacher and researchers in science education. Thus, this paper investigated difficult topics encountered by students in interaction of matter, space and time in senior secondary school Physics. Two research questions and two null hypotheses guided the study. Descriptive survey research design was employed for the study. 21,974 senior secondary school one to three (SSS1-3) physics students in 292 senior secondary schools in Anambra state made up the population of the study. The sample size of the study comprised of 393 drawn from the population (that is; 290- urban and 103- rural; 238- male and 155- female). The sample size was drawn using Yaro Yamane formular. Multi stage sampling procedure were used to compose the sample size. Researchers developed instrument titled, ‘Interaction of Matter, Space and Time Difficulty Identification Questionnaire (IMSTDIQ)’ was used for data collection. The instrument was subjected to face validity by experts from research measurement and evaluation unit, physics education unit, physics and astronomy unit. Cronbach Alpha formula (α) was used to obtain reliability index for IMSTDIQ at 0.79. The reliability index obtained indicated that the instrument is reliable. Research questions 1 & 2 were answered using mean and standard deviation. Independent sampled t-test was used to test hypotheses 1 & 2. All the hypotheses were tested at 0.05 level of significance. Findings revealed that speed and velocity, rectilinear acceleration, equation of uniformly accelerated motion, and simple harmonic motion are the specific difficult topics encountered in interaction of matter, space and time in senior secondary school physics curriculum based on gender and school location. Keywords: Physics, Interaction of Matter, Space and Time DOI: 10.7176/JEP/13-18-12 Publication date:June 30th 202