This study investigates the students’ ideas about an atom by asking them to describe an atom on a paper and pencil questionnaire. Students’ understanding of the structure of an atom, its constituents and their approximate locations, the size of an atom, and energy released by an atom are investigated. Analysis of responses was based on the phenomenographic method. The study does not attempt to develop a catalog of students' "misconceptions" of atoms. It explores how students describe atoms when they are presented with an open-ended question.

Students start the undergraduate quantum chemistry course with incomplete knowledge and many conceptual difficulties about quantum-chemical concepts. This work investigated the impact an undergraduate quantum chemistry course has on students' knowledge and understanding of atomic orbitals, molecular orbitals and related concepts.

In order to study various aspects of students' understanding of atomic orbitals, we have built a 3-D virtual environment -- ``Virtual Water'' -- to support the learning of some concepts of Physics and Chemistry at the final high school or first-year university levels. It focuses on the microscopic structure of water and explores, among others, concepts related to atomic and molecular orbitals.

This paper reports the results of applying a particular analytical perspective to data from an interview study: a typology of learning impediments informed by research into learning and students' ideas in science. This typology is a heuristic tool that may help diagnose the origins of students' learning difficulties. Here it is applied to data from students interviewed about a problematic curriculum topic - the ?oribital?

College level students are expected to be able to make sense of, and explain, aspects of chemical bonding and structure in terms of molecular orbital concepts. The present paper derives from in-depth research into the thinking of a small sample of college chemistry students. This study in one UK college revealed the ways in which students found the orbital concept problematic. A previous paper (i?Conceptualizing quanta: illuminating the ground state of student understanding of atomic orbitalsi?) reports how these students struggled to make sense of atomic structure in orbital terms.

This paper presents and discusses data relating to student understanding of the orbital concept and related ideas at college level (i.e. between secondary and university level education). The data derives from in-depth research into the thinking of a small sample of U.K. students. Students enter this level of study having been explicitly taught a quantum theory of matter (i.e. the particle model), and implicitly introduced to the quantization of charge.

The presentation of sophisticated atomic theory (quantum mechanics) in secondary chemistry texts is not accompanied by sufficient evidence or applications to promote its rational acceptance as determined by a model of conceptual change. Eight secondary chemistry texts were analyzed for four elements associated with a conceptual change model: dissatisfaction, intelligibility, plausibility, and fruitfulness.

In this paper, one student's learning process in a course on quantum atomic physics in grade 13 of a German gymnasium (secondary school) is described. The course lasted 16 weeks for a total of approximately 80 lessons. The aim of the present study is to elaborate the student's cognitive system for atomic physics as a hypothetical pragmatic model to describe, analyse and explain his thinking and learning sequence of several meta-stable conceptions of the atom, starting from a planetary model.

The study reported in this talk is a survey (n=236) that examines how upper secondary students in Norway (18-19 years old) come to terms with the main idea of quantum physics as contrasted to classical mechanics. Two concepts were chosen as indicators, the concept of modelling the atom and the concept of wave-particle duality. The main conclusion is that most students seem to be locked into the classical worldview where material particles have definite locations and moves along definite tracks.

Our approach is centered around the concepts of "state" and "orbital". Its primary aim is to explain and calculate phenomena and basic facts like size, spectra and energies of different atoms, molecules and solids. Our approach makes use of the analogy with standing waves and uses model building with the computer (STELLA) to avoid high mathematical difficulties.