Students' Ideas about Nuclear Radiation -- Before and After Fukushima

This article presents the results of a trend study investigating what students associate with the term radiation and what ideas they have about this topic. The first part of the interview study was conducted in June 2010 and its results were reported in a previously published article (Neumann & Hopf, 2012). Two years later (June 2012, 15 months after the Fukushima accident), the study was replicated under similar preconditions in order to get an impression about a possible shift in the changes of students' ideas. One result of our comparison study was that, compared to the students interviewed in 2010, a significantly higher percentage of students exclusively associated nuclear radiation with the term radiation and their emotions towards the topic were more negative.