The Public’s Knowledge on Radioactivity

What effect does the passing of time after graduation and the type of school attended make?

Abstract

Physics is an unpopular topic in casual conversation today. This may be due to the fact that many adults do not remember any physics that they supposedly learned at school. This paper will address this hypothesis by seeing if time spent since graduating affects adults' understanding of radioactivity, and if school attended makes a difference in this retention. I created an online questionnaire com-posed of demographic questions and questions to probe understanding and misconceptions about radioactivity. I then collected data with this questionnaire from N = 386 individuals with Austrian school-leaving qualifications. I performed a three-way ANOVA and found that there is a difference in knowledge about radioactivity between recent school leavers and non-recent school leavers, with recent school leavers performing better. Nevertheless, even recent school graduates exhibited the typical misconceptions (they conflated irradiation and contamination, for example), with school at-tended making no significant difference.