Students in England and Wales wishing to read for a physics-based degree will, in all but the more exceptional situations, be required to follow the two-year GCE Advanced-level physics course. This course includes, in its mandatory core, material that addresses the topic of ‘quantum phenomena’. Over the years journals such as this have published teaching strategies, for example Lawrence (1996), but few studies addressing what students understand of quantum phenomena can be found. This paper aims to address just this problem.

Using a questionnaire for data collection and two multivariate techniques for analysis this paper reports on the concepts undergraduate physics students in England hold regarding quantum phenomena. The analysis is by Cluster Analysis to find underlying groups of concepts and Multidimensional Scaling to map the concepts onto a three dimensional space. A sample of 338 first and second year undergraduates, from six institutions, was surveyed during 1998. Cluster Analysis generated three distinct Clusters which are named: Quantum thinking, Intermediate thinking and Mechanistic thinking.

Both pre-university and undergraduate students have conceptual problems with the ideas in quantum physics. The initial findings of a study to investigate undergraduate students' understanding of quantum phenomena are presented. The study shows that a questionnaire approach can be used to elicit students' ideas regarding quantum phenomena and that multivariate analysis can be used to draw out both clusters of conceptions and dimensions of understanding.