2022/11/28
Keio University
Professor Hiromitsu Kobayashi of the Department of Physics, Faculty of Law, Keio University, and Associate Professor Mayumi Ikeda of the Department of Foreign Languages and Liberal Arts, Faculty of Science and Technology, and their colleagues conducted a survey mainly targeting first-year students at the university. They investigated the students' knowledge of and interest in scientific terms and the presence of a "physics complex," comparing the results primarily with those of a survey from 10 years ago. This survey has been conducted every 10 years at the Hiyoshi Campus since 1992. The results of the current survey revealed a major shift in the medium for acquiring scientific knowledge, from newspapers to the internet. On the other hand, the timing of when students develop a "science complex" remained almost unchanged from 10 years ago. Among humanities students, those in the Faculty of Economics and the Faculty of Business and Commerce who chose mathematics in the general entrance examination had less of a physics complex. In the Faculty of Science and Technology, students in chemistry and life science fields tended to have a higher physics complex. The proportion of students who do not feel a physics complex increased across both humanities and science and technology students, and for both men and women. The increase was particularly significant for female students, with the proportion increasing 1.4-fold for women in science and technology and 2.0-fold for women in the humanities. Knowledge of terms like RNA and quantum computers increased, and for quantum computers in particular, both knowledge and interest grew. However, interest in most other scientific terms decreased.
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