Abstract
Learning quantum mechanics is challenging, even for upper-level undergraduate and graduate students. Research-validated interactive tutorials that build on students' prior knowledge can be useful tools to enhance student learning. We have been investigating student difficulties with quantum mechanics pertaining to the double-slit experiment in various situations that appear to be counterintuitive and contradict classical notions of particles and waves. For example, if we send single electrons through the slits, they may behave as a "wave" in part of the experiment and as a "particle" in another part of the same experiment. Here we discuss the development and evaluation of a research-validated Quantum Interactive Learning Tutorial (QuILT) which makes use of an interactive simulation to improve student understanding of the double-slit experiment and strives to help students develop a good grasp of foundational issues in quantum mechanics. We discuss common student difficulties identified during the development and evaluation of the QuILT and analyze the data from the pretest and post test administered to the upper-level undergraduate and first-year physics graduate students before and after they worked on the QuILT to assess its effectiveness. These data suggest that on average, the QuILT was effective in helping students develop a more robust understanding of foundational concepts in quantum mechanics that defy classical intuition using the context of the double-slit experiment. Moreover, the upper-level undergraduates outperformed physics graduate students on the post test. One possible reason for this difference in performance may be the level of student engagement with the QuILT due to the grade incentive. In the undergraduate course, the post test was graded for correctness while in the graduate course, it was only graded for completeness.
Highlights
According to a poll of Physics World readers, the interference of single electrons in a double-slit experiment is “the most beautiful experiment in physics” [1]
We note that it is possible that students had difficulties with resolution, and the pretest and post test questions did not explicitly probe student understanding of resolution, in the post test we found that most undergraduate students correctly interpreted the effect of photon wavelength on the interference pattern (91%, see Table VI) which suggests that the scaffolding provided helped students learn the concept of which-path information” (WPI), central to understanding various double-slit experiment (DSE) setups
Once it was determined that the Quantum Interactive Learning Tutorial (QuILT) was effective in meeting the learning objectives in individual administration, it was administered to students in two upper-level undergraduate quantum mechanics courses (N 1⁄4 46) and graduate students who were simultaneously enrolled in the first semester of a graduate-level core quantum mechanics course and a course for training teaching assistants (TAs)
Summary
According to a poll of Physics World readers, the interference of single electrons in a double-slit experiment is “the most beautiful experiment in physics” [1]. The beauty of this experiment comes from its powerful illustration of the quantum nature of microscopic particles This experiment (schematic diagram of the experimental setup shown in Fig. 1) is useful for helping students learn about foundations of quantum mechanics, including the wave-particle duality of a single particle,the probabilistic nature of quantum measurements, collapse of the wave function upon measurement, etc.
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