Common Misconceptions
In quantum mechanics, the misconceptions are not so easy to define, or they are not obviously standing for misconceptions. Most times students are not sure or have no ideas about a statement, because quantum phenomena are often counterintuitive to everyday thinking. As we may know, in quantum computing a quantum object can be in two places or states at one time. This statement is hard for students to say agree or disagree.
Let’s pick up another statement “Light always behaves as a wave”, students may strongly agree in the beginning of this chapter because that‘s what they learned before. And they might, very possibly, change their opinion after some quantum experiments.
As for misconceptions in quantum mechanics, we need to spend much more time to understand what students think. And we need to spend much less time relating our own well formed thoughts. It is not the teacher who should solve the problem, it is the students(Gren, 2000).
To collect information about students’ understanding, questionnaire would be a really good helper when we teach quantum. We may use it whenever we feel we need feedback from students. We can use a five-point scale from “strongly agree” to “strongly disagree” (Gren, 2000), like this one here, and the list of statements on our website.
As we teach, statements like these will be gathered more and more. So, I like to put them into different groups and call them “Clusters”. For example, cluster A contains all the misconceptions related to structure and mental image of entities; cluster B has all related to mechanistic thinking (definite trajectory); cluster C is Quantum thinking; Last cluster is conflicting mechanistic thinking.
In quantum mechanics, the misconceptions are not so easy to define, or they are not obviously standing for misconceptions. Most times students are not sure or have no ideas about a statement, because quantum phenomena are often counterintuitive to everyday thinking. As we may know, in quantum computing a quantum object can be in two places or states at one time. This statement is hard for students to say agree or disagree.
Let’s pick up another statement “Light always behaves as a wave”, students may strongly agree in the beginning of this chapter because that‘s what they learned before. And they might, very possibly, change their opinion after some quantum experiments.
As for misconceptions in quantum mechanics, we need to spend much more time to understand what students think. And we need to spend much less time relating our own well formed thoughts. It is not the teacher who should solve the problem, it is the students(Gren, 2000).
To collect information about students’ understanding, questionnaire would be a really good helper when we teach quantum. We may use it whenever we feel we need feedback from students. We can use a five-point scale from “strongly agree” to “strongly disagree” (Gren, 2000), like this one here, and the list of statements on our website.
As we teach, statements like these will be gathered more and more. So, I like to put them into different groups and call them “Clusters”. For example, cluster A contains all the misconceptions related to structure and mental image of entities; cluster B has all related to mechanistic thinking (definite trajectory); cluster C is Quantum thinking; Last cluster is conflicting mechanistic thinking.
Examples for misconceptions' statement from (Gren, 2000 P17-18).A01: Orbits of electrons are not exactly determined.
A02: It is possible for a single photon to constructively and destructively interfere with itself. B03: The structure of the atom is similar to the way planets orbit the sun. B06: The electron is always a particle. C90: Whether one labels an electron a ‘particle’ or ‘wave’ depends on the particular experiment being carried out. D56: Electrons are waves |
How to address misconceptions
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