Towards a Learning Progression in Quantum Mechanics

Teaching of Quantum Mechanics (QM) has been only recently introduced by curriculum reforms in the last year of secondary school. Hence, little is known about how students progress in their knowledge about QM from secondary to university level. To know in more detail students’ learning pathways in making sense of basic concepts of QM may help construct a more effective teaching framework and develop reliable assessment tasks. This study builds on a learning progression approach to investigate students’ understanding of basic QM concepts from secondary school to university level. Initial learning progressions around three big ideas in QM were constructed taking into account research findings, school textbooks, and physics teachers’ views about QM. The big ideas were atom and electrons; measurement; wave function. To validate the progressions, we developed a multiple choice questionnaire, submitted to 330 students. Rasch analysis was used to analyse students’ responses. Findings led to a revision of the hypothesized learning progressions, which may be useful to design research- based QM teaching sequences from secondary to university level.