Supporting student understanding of introductory quantum physics through guided inquiry-based learning

This dissertation demonstrated the potential of guided, collaborative inquiry-based learning supported by digital labs to enhance the teaching and learning of QP at the secondary level. Across the studies conducted in this thesis, results from applying our learning sequence with high school students indicated positive outcomes. Therefore, our first and foremost key finding is that our teaching approach was successful, as students who learned from our designed materials scored at the same level as or higher than students who received traditional QP instruction on a post-test about QP knowledge. Furthermore, qualitative analyses of students’ input to activities within the ILSs suggest that learners
engaged on in-depth reasoning about QP topics during the investigations. Overall, we consider that the outcomes of our designed learning sequence were positive, and its structure is suitable for teaching QP to high school students. Our second key finding regards the use of analogies with classical physics. Results from our last study suggest that making such analogies when teaching QP might hinder students’ learning, perhaps because students can take the analogies literally or because analogies can increase cognitive load too much.
In addition to these findings, this research also reported two student misconceptions about QP topics which were not yet reported in literature. First, we identified students’ difficulty to differentiate between electron’s flux and speed in the photoelectric effect. Second, we found that students struggled to differentiate between performing the double slit experiment with multiple electrons at once and with individual electrons one at a time. It is important for instructors to pay attention to these misconceptions, as they involve fundamental knowledge that can affect students’ basic and broad understanding of the photoelectric and wave-particle duality topics.
All in all, the contributions of this thesis are twofold: (1) the design, testing, and evaluation of an inquiry-based learning sequence for introductory QP, which can inform high school teachers, physics education researchers, instructional designers, and curriculum developers; and (2) empirical evidence on how such an approach can affect student understanding, both with and without the use of analogies. Future research should further investigate the impact of different interpretations of quantum theory in student understanding of QP, as well as different representations of quantum phenomena and how students’ visualization of these phenomena can affect learning. Finally, our study about the impact of analogies with classical physics suggested that such analogies might not be productive for student understanding of QP and might affect how students build QP concepts, based on the different uses of language by our participants. However, the use of other kinds of analogies could also be explored. While our study focused on analogies with classical physics, which are deterministic, future research could investigate the effect of analogies with a probabilistic nature, for example analogies with a roll of a dice and its different possibilities of outcomes.