Collaborative Research: Student Thinking About Measurements Across the Physics Curriculum

学生对科学本质和科学测量的理解对任何科学课程都很重要。在物理学中，学生们在两种截然不同的背景下体验测量的概念：经典测量和量子力学测量。这个项目的目的是为了更好地理解学生在每种情况下思考测量的方式。它还旨在帮助我们了解两者之间的关系。学生们是否将经典测量的思路带入了他们的量子力学课程？当学生学习量子力学测量时，他们对经典测量的思路是否会随之改变？这个项目将测试我们能在多大程度上概括现有关于学生对测量的理解的研究。这将通过在不同的教学水平和量子力学背景下将研究扩展到新的机构来实现。这项研究将为改进各级测量相关教学奠定基础。本项目的研究目标将解决两个问题。首先，它将询问学生如何在大学物理课程中从经典和量子力学角度对测量进行推理。其次，它将询问学生在经典和量子背景下对测量进行推理的相互作用是什么。学生对经典测量的理解主要有点推理和集合推理两种范式。在点推理中，每一次测量都可能是真值。在集合推理中，每个度量都是对真实值的估计。情景访谈将暗示关于测量的经典或量子推理。一些线索将来自于参考入门实验室或量子力学课程中的活动。其他线索将来自采访的物理环境。然后将对访谈结果进行分析，以确定在这两种情况下关于测量的推理之间的关系。访谈的结果将为调查的发展提供信息，这些调查可以更广泛地分布，以评估两所大学和其他机构更广泛的学生的推理能力。这一奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Student understanding of the nature of science and scientific measurement are important 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 is designed to develop a better understanding of the ways students think about measurement in each context. It also aims to 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. The research goals of this project will address two questions. First, it will ask how students reason about measurement across the university physics curriculum, classically and quantum mechanically. Second, 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 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.