“Be better than you need to be”: A-level Physics students’ rants, resilience and peer pedagogy on TikTok.

Abstract

In recent years, social media has become an increasingly prominent space for students seeking study support and advice. This study examines how A-level Physics—a key university-entry qualification for 16-to-18-year-olds in England—is portrayed by student creators on TikTok, a short-form video platform widely used for peer-to-peer educational guidance, information sharing, and collective knowledge building. Using reflexive thematic analysis of 57 TikTok videos via #alevelphysics, this article explores how A-level Physics is characterised and what pathways to success are constructed within these informal, student-led discourses. The analysis shows that physics is depicted as both intellectually demanding and emotionally taxing, with the examination system perceived as a flawed gatekeeper. Student creators narrate their experiences through a blend of hyperbole, frustration, and resilience, offering sophisticated peer-generated pedagogies alongside cautionary tales. Such rants frequently pivot into “here’s what worked for me”, foregrounding strategic resource curation, sustained practice, systematic memorisation, and deliberate over-preparation. These portrayals of subject demands and students’ agentic responses on TikTok narratives 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. The findings underscore the role of student-led online discourses in shaping expectations around high-stakes science examinations, with implications for encouraging more students to study physics and for supporting those currently studying the subject.

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ORCID for Wonyong Park: orcid.org/0000-0002-8911-5968

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