Abstract
Just as expert physicists vary in their personal stances on interpretation in quantum mechanics, instructors vary on whether and how to teach interpretations of quantum phenomena in introductory modern physics courses. In this paper, we document variations in instructional approaches with respect to interpretation in two similar modern physics courses recently taught at the University of Colorado, and examine associated impacts on student perspectives regarding quantum physics. We find students are more likely to prefer realist interpretations of quantum-mechanical systems when instructors are less explicit in addressing student ontologies. We also observe contextual variations in student beliefs about quantum systems, indicating that instructors who choose to address questions of ontology in quantum mechanics should do so explicitly across a range of topics.
Highlights
Introductory courses in classical physicsas well as everyday experiencegenerally promote in students a realist perspective that is both deterministic1,2͔ and local
The authors of the QPCS found that modern physics students had the most difficulty with six questions which they classified as interpretive; for example, the two survey items with the lowest percentage of correct responses ask whether, “according to the standardCopenhageninterpretation of quantum mechanics,” lightor an electronis behaving like a wave or a particle when traveling from a source to a detector. ͑The authors report that only ϳ20% of students chose the correct response for each of these two questions.͒ The QPCS authors found that do a significant number of students perform reasonably well on the noninterpretative questions while still scoring low on the interpretative items, there were no students who scored high on the interpretative questions but scored low on the noninterpretative ones
These results suggest that many introductory modern physics students may grasp how to use the computational tools of quantum mechanics, without a corresponding facility with notionssuch as wave-particle dualitythat are at odds with their classical intuitions
Summary
TO QUANTUM PHYSICS PHOTOELECTRIC EFFECT, PHOTONS ATOMIC SPECTRA, BOHR MODEL DE BROGLIE WAVES/ATOMIC MODEL MATTER WAVES/INTERFERENCE WAVE FUNCTIONS, SCHRODINGER. PHYS3B3͒ pre- and post-instruction survey questions designed to probe student beliefs about quantum mechanics. Through our analysis of these data, we explore the questions of what types of instructional practices might be associated with variations in student perspectives, and whether the perspectives exhibited by students in one context are applied consistently to a context where attention to interpretation was less explicit
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