Breaking the Backbone of Difficult Concepts in the New Secondary School Physics Curriculum in Africa

The new senior secondary school physics curriculum for Anglophone West African countries came into use in 2015. Since the beginning of its implementation, even though, the performance of the candidates has not been high, yet reported empirical studies on the difficulty level of the content, and specifically the topics or concepts have been scant. Moreover, there have never been any published studies which conducted an in-depth probe into the aspects of the topics students find difficult in physics and science in general, beyond mere cataloguing of such topics, nor have there been any, in which students were qualitatively engaged in making inputs towards the amelioration of the topic difficulty. This is a huge gap in literature which this study determined to fill. The effort is significant to the extent that understanding the areas of difficulties of the topics as perceived by the students is good pointer towards remedy by teachers and stakeholders. The study therefore undertook five missions: (a) to find out the topics in the new physics curriculum that secondary school students find difficult (b) undertake in-depth probe of the specific aspects of the topics for which students have learning difficulty. (c) probe the possible causes of or factors responsible for these difficulties (d) determine if school location, school ownership and students’ gender have impacts on students’ perception of physics topics difficulty; and (e) deriving from students’ views, suggest how physics can be made easy to learn. A sample of 1,105 students was drawn from 21 secondary schools in Nigeria and Ghana. These schools comprised 12 private and nine public schools randomly selected from rural and urban areas. 75% of the schools were urban while about 25% were rural. Randomly selected 10 students and five teachers were interviewed for qualitative data, while all the participants were involved in responding to the questionnaire. From data gathered, five top most difficult topics were refractive index, electromagnetism, radioactivity, curved lenses and sound: production, propagation and modulation. Rich qualitative data unique for this study, was reported. There was marked difference between urban and rural, private and public, but not in gender. Recommendations were made for better teaching and meaningful learning. Keywords: Backbone of difficult topics; meaningful learning of physics