No abstract

Most educational literature on conceptual change concerns the process by which introductory students acquire scientific knowledge. However, with modern developments in science and technology, the social significance of learning successive theories is steadily increasing, thus opening new areas of interest to discipline-based education research, e.g., quantum logic, quantum information, and communication. Here, we present an initial proposal for modeling the transition from the understanding of a theory to the understanding of its successor and explore its generative potential by applying it to a concrete case—the classical-quantum transition in physics. In pursue of such task, we make coordinated use of contributions from research not only on conceptual change in education, but also on the history and philosophy of science, on the teaching and learning of quantum mechanics, and on mathematics education. By means of analytical instruments developed for characterizing conceptual trajectories at different representational levels, we review empirical literature in the search for the connections between theory change and cognitive demands. The analysis shows a rich landscape of changes and new challenges that are absent in the traditionally considered cases of conceptual change. In order to fully disclose the educational potential of the analysis, we visualize categorical changes by means of dynamic frames, identifying recognizable patterns that answer to students’ need of comparability between the older and the new paradigm. Finally, we show how the frame representation can be used to suggest pattern-dependent strategies to promote the understanding of the new content, and may work as a guide to curricular design.

Learning quantum mechanics entails adopting a new reference frame for the physical interpretation of the world. The quantum perspective is intrinsically connected with math, which becomes a sort of referent for physical meaning, requiring the employment of new formal structures and a new interpretation of familiar ones. Research evidences that students have difficulty both with concepts and with the use of formalism in qualitative tasks. We administered a 15-item questionnaire focused on incompatibility of observables and related formal structures to 40 physics students of three Italian universities. Semi-structured interviews were scheduled on a subset of students. Results concerning translation processes between math and physical meaning show that most students only look at the square modulus in order to reason on physical information encoded in quantum state, thus neglecting phase relations and their connection with incompatibility.

Stimulated by the European project “QTEdu CSA”, within the flagship “Quantum Technologies”, a community of researchers active in the fields of quantum technologies and physics education has designed and implemented an extracurricular course on quantum physics concepts and quantum technologies applications for high school. The course, which featured eight interactive lectures, was organized online between March and May 2021 and attended by about 250 students from all over Italy. In this paper, we describe the main tenets and activities of the course. Moreover, we report on the effectiveness of the course on students’ knowledge of the basic concepts of quantum physics and students’ views about epistemic aspects and applications of quantum technologies. Results show that the designed activities were effective in improving students’ knowledge about fundamental aspects of quantum mechanics and familiarizing them with quantum technology applications.

In order to support students in the development of expertise in quantum mechanics (QM), as well as to provide insight on teaching, we asked which concepts and structures can act as organizing principles in basic QM (RQ1). The research question has been addressed in a multi-step process based on the analysis of categorization studies, on a content analysis of a sample of upperundergraduate course textbooks and on the results of existing research on learning difficulties in QM. The answer to RQ1 consists in seven concept maps, intended as models of the organizing principles of quantum knowledge needed to account for the results of measurement and time evolution both at a qualitative and quantitative level. By means of these instruments, it is possible to visualize and explore the different facets of the interplay of the vector structure of the quantum states and the operator structure of the observables, and to highlight the educational significance of the relations between observables. The relations provide tools for predicting the results of the processes, and explain how information on measurement and time evolution is encoded in the modulus and in the phase of the probability amplitudes. In addition, basic phenomena and formal structures are traceable to the emergence of a specific relation: incompatibility of observables. At upper-undergraduate level, the instruments developed in this work can be used by instructors as a support for helping students build a well-organized knowledge structure and by researchers as a basis for the design of investigations into student understanding. While this framework may be adapted to different approaches and interpretive stances, it provides indications in favor of a spinfirst approach over a waves-first one. At high school level, a simplified version of the framework has been used as a basis for the design of a teaching-learning sequence.