United States

AAPT SM 20

Analogous Patterns of Student Reasoning Difficulties in Introductory Physics and Upper-Level Quantum Mechanics

teaching and learning framework

upper-division courses

quantum mechanics

The 2020 AAPT Virtual Summer Meeting brought together physics educators from around the globe to learn about the latest in physics theory, research methodology and education from leaders in their field. The program featured plenary speakers, sessions, workshops and many special activities.

For more information please visit the 2020 AAPT Virtual Summer Meeting page at: https://www.aapt.org/Conferences/SM2020/index.cfm.


The 2020 AAPT Virtual Summer Meeting brought together physics educators from around the globe to learn about the latest in physics theory, research methodology and education from leaders in their field. 

poster

Here we focus on an investigation that suggests that, even though Dirac notation is used extensively, many advanced undergraduate and Ph.D. students in physics have difficulty expressing the identity operator and other Hermitian operators corresponding to physical observables in Dirac notation. We first describe the difficulties students have with expressing the identity operator and other Hermitian operators corresponding to observables in Dirac notation. We then discuss how the difficulties found via written surveys and individual interviews were used as a guide in the development and validation of a Quantum Interactive Learning Tutorial (QuILT) to help students develop a good grasp of these concepts. We also discuss the effectiveness of the QuILT based on in-class evaluations. We thank the National Science Foundation for support.

Investigating and improving student understanding of quantum mechanical observables and their corresponding operators in Dirac notation

Development and Evaluation of a Quantum Interactive Learning Tutorial on Larmor Precession Of Spin

Development and validation of an Interactive Tutorial on Mach-Zehnder Interferometer with Single Photons

Just-in-Time Teaching and Peer Instruction using clickers in a quantum mechanics course

Development and validation of an Interactive Learning Tutorial on Quantum Key Distribution

Ask your colleagues how they learned to do research. Most of us learned how to do research by reading publications our advisor told us to read and discussing the research with the research group or the group leader. We basically learned by doing something similar to that which has been already done and failing. In the failing, we modified some part of what we were doing and tried again. In this presentation I will present what my students do in Junior Lab to learn about designing a lab, communicating the results, and decision making in the process. I will also share my evaluation of their actions and reflect upon this process.

Junior Physics Laboratory: Scientific Reasoning, Communication & Decision Making

Students’ self-efficacy, interest and identity in physics can influence their learning, performance and career decisions. Therefore, we investigated the impact of learning environment on male and female students’ physics self-efficacy, interest and identity in calculus-based introductory physics. Findings can be useful in creating equitable and inclusive learning environments in which all students can thrive. We thank the National Science Foundation for support.

How learning environment predicts male and female students’ physics motivational beliefs in introductory physics courses

Student outcomes in introductory physics courses influence their retention in STEM disciplines and future career aspirations. This study investigates how the learning environment predicts male and female students’ outcomes, including grade, self-efficacy, interest, and identity. These findings can be useful to provide support and to create an equitable and inclusive learning environment to help all students excel in algebra-based physics courses.

How the learning environment predicts male and female students’ motivational beliefs in algebra-based introductory physics

Successful programs build support among department colleagues and university administration. Ideally building a teacher preparation program begins with institutional commitment before the first proposal is written. University strategic plans often include sentiments like: “Enhance our ability to recruit new students of excellent quality and support their success” and “Provide students the tools for success in the job markets of the future.” Showing your efforts are aligned with administrative priorities is necessary to ensuring institutional support. Department support is also easier to gain and maintain when teacher preparation is cast in terms of departmental priorities such as an improved undergraduate program and significant positive attention from administration. Related efforts around launching two PhysTEC programs will be discussed.

Building Institutional Support: Lessons Learned from Two Physics Sites

Analysis of institutional data for physics majors showing predictive relationships between required mathematics and physics courses in various years is important for contemplating how the courses build on each other and whether there is need to make changes to the curriculum for the majors to strengthen these relationships. We use 15 years of institutional data at a large research university to investigate how introductory physics and mathematics courses predict male and female physics majors' performance on required advanced physics and mathematics courses. We used Structure Equation Modeling (SEM) to investigate these predictive relationships and find that among introductory and advanced physics and mathematics courses, there are gender differences in performance in favor of male students only in the introductory physics courses after controlling for high school GPA. We found that a measurement invariance fully holds in a multi-group SEM by gender, so it was possible to carry out analysis with gender mediated by introductory physics and high school GPA. Moreover, we find that these introductory physics courses that have gender differences do not predict performance in advanced physics courses. Also, introductory mathematics courses predict performance in advanced mathematics courses which in turn predict performance in advanced physics courses. Furthermore, apart from the introductory physics courses that do not predict performance in future physics courses, there is a strong predictive relationship between the sophomore, junior and senior level physics courses.

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Analogous Patterns of Student Reasoning Difficulties in Introductory Physics and Upper-Level Quantum Mechanics

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Investigating and improving student understanding of quantum mechanical observables and their corresponding operators in Dirac notation

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