Understanding first year university students’ curiosity and interest about physics

The European shortage of students pursuing further studies and careers in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) is particularly severe in the field of physical sciences. Many physics departments suffer from high dropout rates, partly caused by students’ decrease of interest during their studies. To address these problems and to help teachers at all educational levels improve their practices, the EU-funded HOPE (Horizons in Physics Education) project examined the views of first-year Physics students in European universities. Here we report the results of an interview study on how students perceive their reasons for choosing physics as their field of study. 94 semi-structured interviews were conducted in 16 universities and analyzed through a two-round process. The results show that the first-year students used chiefly expressions of interest and intrinsic motivation to describe factors inspiring them to study physics, while expectations of success, as well as utility and attainment values, played smaller roles.