Collaborative Research: Student Thinking About Measurements Across the Physics Curriculum

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Student understanding of the nature of science and scientific measurement are critical for any science curriculum. In physics, students experience the ideas of measurement in two very different contexts: classical measurement and quantum mechanical measurement. This project will develop a better understanding of the ways students think about measurement in each context. It will also help us understand relations between the two. Do students carry lines of thinking about classical measurement into their quantum mechanics courses? When students learn about quantum mechanical measurements, do their lines of thinking about classical measurement change in response? This project will test how well we can generalize existing research on student understanding of measurement. This will be done by extending the research to new institutions, at different instructional levels, and in quantum mechanical contexts. This study will lay the groundwork for improving instruction related to measurement at all levels. This project will address two research questions. First, it will ask how students reason about measurement across the university physics curriculum, classically and quantum mechanically. Secondly it will ask what the interplay is between how students reason about measurement in classical and quantum contexts. Student understanding of classical measurement has been characterized by a point reasoning and set reasoning paradigms. In point reasoning, each measurement could be the true value. In set reasoning, each measurement is an estimate of the true value. Situational interviews will cue either classical or quantum reasoning about measurement. Some cues will come from referring to activities in introductory labs or quantum mechanics courses. Other cues will come from the physical environment of the interviews. Interview results will then be analyzed to identify the relationships between reasoning about measurement in either context. Results from the interviews will inform the development of surveys that can be distributed more broadly to evaluate reasoning of a wider range of students at the two institutions and beyond.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.