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Measurement uncertainty is an important topic in the undergraduate laboratory curriculum. Previous research on student thinking about experimental measurement uncertainty has focused primarily on introductory-level students’ procedural reasoning about data collection and interpretation. In this paper, we extended this prior work to study upper-level students’ thinking about sources of measurement uncertainty across experimental contexts, with a particular focus on classical and quantum mechanics contexts. We developed a survey to probe students’ thinking in the generic question “What comes to mind when you think about measurement uncertainty in [classical/quantum] mechanics?” as well as in a range of specific experimental scenarios and interpreted student responses through the lens of availability and accessibility of knowledge pieces. We found that limitations of the experimental setup were most accessible to students in classical mechanics while principles of the underlying physics theory were most accessible to students in quantum mechanics, even in a context in which this theory was not relevant. We recommend that future research probe which sources of uncertainty experts believe are relevant in which contexts and how instruction in both classical and quantum contexts can help students draw on appropriate sources of uncertainty in classical and quantum experiments.
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Comparing introductory and beyond-introductory students’ reasoning about uncertainty
Uncertainty is an important concept in physics laboratory instruction. However, little work has examined how students reason about uncertainty beyond the introductory (intro) level. In this work we aimed to compare intro and beyond-intro students’ ideas about uncertainty. We administered a survey to students at 10 different universities with questions probing procedural reasoning about measurement, student-identified sources of uncertainty, and predictive reasoning about data distributions. We found that intro and beyond-intro students answered similarly on questions where intro students already exhibited expert-level reasoning, such as in comparing two data sets with the same mean but different spreads, identifying limitations in an experimental setup, and predicting how a data distribution would change if more data were collected. For other questions, beyond-intro students generally exhibited more expertlike reasoning than intro students, such as when determining whether two sets of data agree, identifying principles of measurement that contribute to spread, and predicting how a data distribution would change if better data were collected. Neither differences in institutions, student majors, lab courses taken, nor research experience were able to fully explain the variability between intro and beyond-intro student responses. These results call for further research to better understand how students’ ideas about uncertainty develop beyond the intro level.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1809178
- PAR ID:
- 10524568
- Publisher / Repository:
- American Physical Society
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Physical Review Physics Education Research
- Volume:
- 19
- Issue:
- 2
- ISSN:
- 2469-9896
- Subject(s) / Keyword(s):
- Physics Education Research Scientific reasoning and problem solving
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevPhysEducRes.19.020147
