"Be Better Than You Need to Be": A-Level Physics Students' Rants, Resilience and Peer Pedagogy on TikTok

TL;DR

This study analyzes TikTok videos by A-level Physics students to understand how they portray the subject, highlighting emotional challenges, peer pedagogies, and strategies for success in a social media context.

Contribution

It provides new insights into student-led online discourses on TikTok, revealing how students construct and navigate the challenges of A-level Physics through peer narratives.

Findings

Physics depicted as demanding and emotionally taxing

Students share resilience and coping strategies

Social media fosters shared understanding and peer support

Abstract

Amid the growth of social media, students increasingly turn to short-form platforms for study support and advice. This study examines how A-level Physics is portrayed by student creators on TikTok, a popular platform amongst students for peer-to-peer educational guidance, information sharing, and collective knowledge building. Using reflexive thematic analysis of 57 TikTok videos via #alevelphysics, we explore how A-level Physics is characterised and what pathways to success are constructed within these informal discourses. The findings show that the subject is depicted as both intellectually demanding and emotionally taxing, with the examination system perceived as a flawed gatekeeper. Creators narrate their experiences through a blend of hyperboles, frustration, and resilience, offering sophisticated peer-generated pedagogies alongside cautionary tales. Recommendations emphasise strategic resource curation, sustained practice, systematic memorisation, and a mindset of deliberate over-preparation. These portrayals of subject demands and agentic responses resonate with prior research on the cultural construction of physics as hard and exclusionary, while also illustrating how affinity spaces on social media enable students to reframe difficulty through shared feelings and tactics. We discuss the value of student-led online discourses about high-stakes examinations for educators in supporting prospective and current physics students.