You might be interested in this for all sorts of reasons, whether you’ve interest in science education in the UK or not. It relates to similar issues elsewhere, such as the USA. It’s a rather good (if a bit depressing) report on physics education in the UK, and how the UK does in the international Physics Olympiad compared to other countries. There’s a visit to the “training camp” for the Olympiad, and interviews with students and teachers. Have a listen – it is only nine minutes long.
The UK does not do very well, to cut to the chase. Not very well at all. China is the powerhouse, with the US and Iran also being very good. Notably, all three countries invest heavily in serious training and educational programs for the Olympiad, and it is also notable that Iran has very strong female representation.
More worrying, perhaps, is the decline of students’ knowledge of physics overall, since the UK’s A-level physics syllabus covers a smaller and smaller fraction of the international physics curriculum. (That fear that the feeling you have that students – even the very best ones – seem to know less and less physics as the years go by? It’s not unfounded.) Further, among the students making it to the Olympiad team, you’ll find hardly any representation from state schools. The vast majority of students are from “independent” schools. Not good, and all to familiar over here in the USA too.
I heard this on one of my favourite programs I listen to every week, “Broadcasting House” on BBC Radio 4. (I recommend it for a great mix of current affairs with humour for a light Sunday Morning touch that’s very welcome. It is hosted by the excellent Paddy O’Connell (almost as good as his predecessor, the brilliant Eddie Mair). Being in LA, I listen to the podcast. The website is here, or search for the title on itunes to subscribe to the podcast directly.)
The report above is the 13th July edition, and the report begins at about the time stamp 22:40.
Enjoy!
-cvj
Well, I think you’re comparing apples and oranges. It has nothing to do with physics research. It is largely a game. Rather like doing well in a spelling bee has little to do with being able to write a great novel. Any teacher who dupes a student into thinking that success in one translates automatically to success in another is doing them a disservice. Now that does not mean that a spelling competition is wrong. People should participate in it for what it is – a battle of wits and knowledge in a constrained framework. I would say further though, that if fewer and fewer of the pool of students who might qualify (by age) to enter the spelling bee have even heard of fewer and fewer of the words they are being called upon to spell, you might worry that something is wrong with the general English education in schools. Or at least I hope you would.
Nobody wants to overstate the links between the Olympiad and education in general. I think it was made clear in the above post and some of the comments where there are links and where there aren’t.
Best,
-cvj
Hi,
My view is that the olympiad only emphasises a very limited part of what it takes to succeed in physics research and perhaps an insignificant part at that. The emphasis is on speed, and applying various kinds of ‘tricks’ to solve a problem. The emphasis is also on solving quiz like problems within a very short period of time in contrast to say building a theory which can take years.
There is alot of preparation that goes into the olympiad and if a student develops a mentality of solving olympiad style problems, he may have difficulty or lose interest later on in his career when he discovers that research is very different from what he was previously used to.
Given that the olympiad is very different from research physics, does it matter that the UK, (where I live) or any other country does not do well in it? and why?
Hi,
I don’t see anything intrinsically wrong with them. I think that such things can increase interest in learning for its own sake, spiced with a bit of competition and so forth. All in good fun, in balance. Whether there are harmful aspects really depends upon how things are organized. It would be nice to think that it could be run in a way that was inclusive… somehow improving the fraction of participants from non-independent schools. But the issues are complicated (and yes, somewhat tied to issues to do with national curricula and so forth) and so it is difficult for me to say anything particularly insightful as an outsider to the real details.
Thanks for asking.
What do you think?
Cheers,
-cvj
Professor Clifford, what is your view of olympiad physics?
can they do more harm than good?
Also true of GCSEs, and the speed of reduction in the amount of material being taught is pretty astonishing. Towards the end of my science GCSE courses several years ago now, my teachers handed us large stacks of past papers to work through for revision. For the chemistry and biology the instructions were “Just get on with it”; but for physics, we were given a list of questions we should *not* attempt along with each past paper, because of the changes in the syllabus. That is, the changes in a few years were sufficient that one would come across a questions and not just think “ok, that’s a bit hard and I’ll have to think about it more than I have to think about the other questions” but you’d actually think “what the heck does that question even mean?” because entire modules had been removed from the syllabus.
It’s all rather sad.
–IP
Hi Peter,
I absolutely agree with you that it would be extremely facile to translate one to the other. Happily, no such translation was made in my post here, nor in the news report.
That there are relations between the two things is noted, however, and it forms a basis for a constructive discussion and reflection on related issues. Some of the readers and commenters then went further and discussed issues in schools, as they are quite welcome to do. It does not mean that they think there is a 1-1 correlation between Olympiad success and quality of schools.
Nobody came even close to saying that.
Best Wishes,
-cvj
I still think it’s extremely facile to translate “Physics Olympiad performance” to “quality of educational system,” and certainly to compare the UK and the US in this regard. As an example on how the transatlantic comparison fails: on this year’s American international team, four of the five students are from the public sector, and 3/5 or 4/5 is typical.
I don’t know how things function in other countries, but in the US there’s very much a pipeline – the system relies crucially on the relatively few high school teachers who are *aware* of the Olympiad and can be bothered/are able to administer the initial screening tests. (It turns out to be very difficult to give an hour-long external test to a small subset of students in most public schools.) If there’s a similar issue in Britain, it may be the case that a lot can be ascribed to specific issues rather than to overarching institutional failures. Statistically, Canada, Belgium, Norway, Austria, Ireland, Italy, and Switzerland do much worse than the UK in medal count, while Romania, Australia, and Belarus do better, and I doubt that’s ascribable to differences in the schools that most students would ever see.
Thanks. Fair point. In trying to write a fairly quick post, my emphasis was a bit strong, yes. I mentioned US, China and Iran in one sentence, and then the following “invest” sentence was really meant to apply mainly to the other two. I’ve forgotten whether the report says implies that there’s “heavy” investment in the US, but the key point that’s being relayed is that they are indeed doing way better than the UK in resource and training issues.
It is of course clear (and commensurate with other things I said in the opening paragraph of the post and in the comments) that the UK and the USA have a lot in common with regards structural problems in some of these matters, relative to the other countries mentioned.
Cheers,
-cvj
I’m amused to hear that the US “invest[s] heavily in serious training and educational programs for the Olympiad” – this might surprise the American Association of Physics Teachers a little bit, who run the program on a shoestring (and without any direct federal funding) – they borrow lab facilities from the University of Maryland during an interim and try to find cheap hotels in College Park not prone to room invasions. The training period is roughly two months, most of that spent at home working through previous Olympiad questions, and bear in mind much of the material the students need to learn has not been encountered in their high school classes (relativity, statistical mechanics, AC circuits, lab techniques…) On that scale the UK program must be really lacking resources.
Hi Clifford,
Many thanks for your reply. Years ago, I had a British girlfriend who told me that she thought the elimination of the public selective grammar schools in the UK was a big mistake. While choosing whether one would attend such a school a age 11 could be argued about, as opposed to perhaps a somewhat later age,the basic idea was sound. She told me that for someone like herself who was academically talented, but from a poor family, it would have been much harder to attend university if she went to the ordinary comprehensive school which largely replaced them.
Hi,
It really depends upon the high school. I’ve seen good high school students from both systems. I’ve also seen terrible students from both systems.
I have the privilege of teaching some of the finest high school graduates, since USC, where I work, attracts a very high proportion of them. It is not true that there is no calculus in US high schools. I also used to teach excellent school graduates as a professor at Durham in the UK, which also attracts excellent students. I find that the best students in both groups compare very well.
What bothers me a lot in all this is the complacency that a lot of people in the UK have that their science (and other) education standards in schools and other institutions, and those of the general public, are somehow superior to that of the USA, because of beliefs about how the systems differ. What I see a lot is more convergence between the two. Those much vaunted educational standards are being eroded more and more as the years go by, and (as that report and many other examples point out) the content that used to be taught in every high school is most commonly found in the schools largely populated by children of high-fee-paying parents. Sounds a lot like what is common over here in the USA.
I don’t want to overstate things, and I certainly don’t have comprehensive figures to hand, but whenever I talk to people who really know the systems (teachers, for example) this is what I hear, and it seems to fit a lot with what can be gleaned from reports such as the one in the main post.
Best,
-cvj
Clifford,
How would you compare High school physics taught in the UK to the way its taught in the US ? I always got the impression that the UK courses were on a somewhat higher lever since simple calculus is used while US course don’t go beyond algebra and trigonometry. Is this still correct ?
Uh… yeah… we’re doing it wrong. For sure.
-cvj
Comment about Iran- to my knowledge, it’s the only country out there where the majority of physics majors are women, which is attributed to the fact that the culture didn’t have a tradition of physics as being a “male” discipline.
Now call me crazy, but I like to think if a country that treats women as second-class citizens can still have more female physics students than anyone else we might be doing it wrong.
Oh yes, I did forget her, but she was not there for very long, I thought. Always thought of her as interim. But that’s probably wrong of me.
(Update: Well, to be fair, I really did not forget her, any more than I forgot Matthew Bannister… I did not mean to suggest that Eddie was the *immediate* predecessor, you see. It seems that she was intended to be a longer-term presenter but she took leave and did not come back to it for whatever reason.)
-cvj
I liked the bit with the Michelson interferometer. And I’m pretty certain we didn’t do that at A-Level…
You’re forgetting Fi Glover – she followed Eddie Mair as the presenter of BH. It’s a fabulous show – I don’t know how I would manage to drag myself out of bed and do ironing on a Sunday morning if I didn’t have this to console myself with!