Student understanding of quantum mechanics at the beginning of graduate instruction

By Chandralekha Singh. 2008

157 citations recorded by the source corpus.

A survey was developed to probe student understanding of quantum mechanics at the beginning of graduate instruction. The survey was administered to 202 physics graduate students enrolled in first-year quantum mechanics courses from seven universities at the beginning of the first semester. We also conducted one-on-one interviews with fifteen graduate or advanced undergraduate students who had just completed a course in which all the content on the survey was covered. Although students from some universities performed better on average than others, we found that students share universal difficulties understanding the concepts of quantum mechanics. The difficulties were often due to overgeneralizations of concepts learned in one context to other contexts where they are not directly applicable. Difficulties in distinguishing between closely related concepts and making sense of the formalism of quantum mechanics were common. The results of this study can sensitize instructors of first-year graduate quantum ph...

Subfields: Developmental and Educational Psychology, Education, Physical and Theoretical Chemistry

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4a72c72ff86fb1ea435ae92ad75acb11792db540

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In Developmental and Educational Psychology

In Education

In Physical and Theoretical Chemistry

Emily Megan Marshman

Citations in the corpus

A Review of Student Difficulties in Upper-Level Quantum Mechanics (2015, background): “[24], in response to the question asking for Ψðx; tÞ given an initial state which is a linear superposition of the ground and first excited states, Ψðx; t 1⁄4 0Þ 1⁄4 ffiffiffiffiffiffiffi 2=7 p φ1ðxÞ þ ffiffiffiffiffiffiffi 5=7 p φ2ðxÞ, some students wrote incorrect intermediate steps, e.”
Insights into teaching quantum mechanics in secondary and lower undergraduate education (2017, background): “[42] and Singh [43]: (1) misunderstanding due to overgeneralizations of prior concepts, and (2) difficulty distinguishing between closely related concepts [40–43], which results in a mix up of energy, wave functions, and probability.”