This paper lists 15 commonly held misconceptions concerning quantum mechanics, such as "Energy eigenstates are the only allowed states" and "The wave function is dimensionless." A few suggestions are offered to help combat these misconceptions in teaching.

We developed a survey to probe student understanding of quantum mechanics concepts at the beginning of graduate instruction. The survey was administered to 202 graduate students in physics enrolled in first-year quantum mechanics courses from seven different universities at the beginning of the first semester. We also conducted one-on-one interviews with fifteen graduate students or advanced undergraduate students who had just finished a course in which all the content on the survey was covered. We find that students share universal difficulties about fundamental quantum mechanics concepts.

The Physics Education Research Group at University of Maryland has been studying student learning of quantum mechanics. Our previously reported research shows that student difficulties exist with classical concepts that are prerequisite for learning quantum mechanics. In this talk, we report detailed studies of student difficulties in quantum mechanics arising from confusions with the classical concept of energy.

(first paragraph from Chapter 6: Discussion, 6.1: Summary of findings:)
The relevance of the results of this study can be best expressed by presenting them in a different order from the way they were reported in Chapter 5. The results can be thought of as a description of what a student goes through when introduced to a new concept in quantum mechanics. This will give a picture that exposes the extent of the difficulties students encounter.

Research studies on students' conceptions in the area of quantum physics are, in contrast to other areas of physics, rather rare. The present study gives results from quantitative and qualitative data with grade 13 students (age 19) in German high schools, taken before and after instruction as well as from transcripts during instruction. Only students from classes, which used a Schroedinger approach to understand atoms and electron orbitals, were taken. As a first result, we describe students' beliefs about models.