We report on a multi-year, multi-institution study to investigate students' reasoning about energy in the context of quantum tunnelling. We use ungraded surveys, graded examination questions, individual clinical interviews and multiple-choice exams to build a picture of the types of responses that students typically give. We find that two descriptions of tunnelling through a square barrier are particularly common. Students often state that tunnelling particles lose energy while tunnelling.

During individual clinical interviews, the interaction between researcher and interviewee leads to a specific set of data that can later be interpreted from several viewpoints. In this paper, we describe three analyses of a student's reasoning. First, we describe her "physics reasoning" in terms of the physical situation she describes and the "difficulties" she has in reasoning about the interview question. Second, we describe some "reasoning resources" that she uses. Finally, we describe "epistemological resources" that may influence her reasoning about quantum physics.

In studying student reasoning about quantum physics in the context of tunneling through a barrier, we observe that students commonly use several reasoning resources in conjunction with one another. Our data is gathered in individual student interviews, ungraded quizzes, diagnostic surveys, and examination questions. We believe that solely a microscopic perspective on the individually used reasoning resources is too narrow to help us understand student reasoning.

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Quantum mechanics is an area of immense importance in physics education given its intrinsic difficulty and prominence in contemporary research and technology development. Educational research in this area is comparatively limited, however, because quantum mechanics is a higher level subject with many fewer students than Newtonian mechanics or electromagnetism. This study summarizes and complements research on students’ conceptions of quantum tunneling, which has been identified by several researchers as a key quantum mechanics topic.

Members of the University of Maine Physics Education Research Laboratory are studying student understanding of the phenomenon of quantum tunneling through a potential barrier, a standard topic in most introductory quantum physics courses. When a series of interviews revealed that many students believe energy is lost in the tunneling process, a survey was designed to investigate the prevalence of the energy-loss idea. This survey was administered to populations of physics majors at the sophomore and senior levels.

We report on a qualitative study of student learning of quantum tunneling in traditional and reformed modern physics courses. In the reformed courses, which were designed to address student difficulties found in previous research, students still struggle with many of the same issues found in other courses, but the reasons for these difficulties are more subtle, and many new issues are brought to the surface.

We present a study of student understanding of energy in quantum mechanical tunneling and barrier penetration. This paper will focus on student responses to two questions that were part of a test given in class to two modern physics classes and in individual interviews with 17 students. The test, which we refer to as the Quantum Mechanics Conceptual Survey (QMCS), is being developed to measure student understanding of basic concepts in quantum mechanics.

What is the best approach when it comes to teaching introductory quantum mechanics? Should students first learn how to do quantum mechanics, by doing numerous mathematical manipulations? Or should students start by understanding what quantum mechanics means? Perhaps we should do both. Then the question remains how the doing and the understanding fit together.

Quantum mechanics is an area of immense importance to modern technologies and industries, covering a diverse range of applications from semiconductors and lasers to advances in nuclear medicine. Quantum mechanics is also a subject that most students have traditionally found both difficult and abstract. Despite these facts, quantum mechanics has not until recently attracted much pedagogical research and introductory courses are still taught in much the same manner as they have been for the past seventy five years.