A study of social representations of quantum physics held by high school students through numerical and written word association tests

Abstract

This paper presents findings of a preliminary research on possible social representations of quantumtheory that might being shared by high school students. Its purpose was to identify and tocharacterize these social representations through numerical and written word association tests(NWAT and WWAT) and multidimensional scaling (MDS) techniques of analysis. Theunderstanding of such representations might provide hints of the influence of the media on thestudents' ideas regarding scientific concepts. In school learning, these ideas are part of the students'prior knowledge, which, when these ideas act as subsumers, can play a key role, not necessarily inthe sense of helping, in the occurrence of meaningful learning of quantum mechanics.

Quantum Physics Teaching and the Theory of Social Representations: investigating the presence of Quantum Mysticism concepts among high school students in the south of Brazil

“…The nucleus and the peripheral system are indirectly addressed in Moscovici"s work, but they are not explicitly mentioned. The elucidation of these terms, as highlighted by Maturano and Mazzitelli (2017), Hilger and Moreira (2012) and Sierra (2011), is a contribution from another social psychologists, who continued and expanded Moscovici"s work, the French psychologist Jean-Claude Abric (1914Abric ( -2012, who writes that:…”

“…When approaching an already well-known subject, it is understood that there is a change in the old representation. Evidently, the creation of a SR is not an immediate or instantaneous process, on the contrary, Hilger and Moreira (2012) emphasize that this is a process that takes time, since students need to appropriate new concepts, even so, when a new content is given, the process of formation of a new SR has started. After, for example, a month of an introduction of Quantum Physics (as it happened in our Study 2), we understand that enough time has passed for students to acquire (or build) new knowledge about concepts they did not know (introductory quantum concepts), so it is reasonable to assume that a new SR is formed, which can evolve and change as classes continue, where students may have the possibility to communicate and to discuss the topic, in order to constantly remodel the group"s SR. About the social place where the representations emerged, Moscovici emphasizes that there are two universes, the consensual and reified universes, which replace the notions of sacred and profane sciences from previous theories from Sociology of Science.…”

“…Thenceforward, many interpretations from Quantum Mechanics were extrapolate to various ordinary situations, like "the observer creates reality", "free will is guaranteed by the uncertainty principle", among others (MOURA; SANTOS, 2017), situations that had influence, for example, in many situations in literature and also cinema industry. In this sense, Hilger and Moreira (2012) discuss the influence of the media and identified possible SRs of students about quantum theory. The authors identified that some ideas that may be linked to quantum mysticism can often play a central role in the students" SR, and this is mainly due to external influences other than the context of the classroom.…”

“…From a methodological point of view, this is important when defining conceptions of students, if these conceptions are related to quantum mysticism (consensual universe for TSR) or not. For simplification, we stablished ourselves in a similar attitude as Moura and Santos (2017) and Hilger and Moreira (2012) when deciding what expressions and words answered by students could be classified as mystical or not, as explained in greater detail in Hoernig, Massoni and Hadjimichef (2021).…”

“…It is also observed in this network of Figure 3 the word "water" (six times), close to "sea" (three times) and "ocean" (one time). These words seem to have little or no relation to "Quantum", however, as identified by Hilger and Moreira (2012), these expressions and others such as "thought" and "mind", are commonly related to Quantum Physics due to misconceptions on the subject, commonly disseminated in science fiction movies, or in cartoons and children"s stories as pointed out by Vílchez-González and Palacios (2006).…”