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We have developed a complete collection of freely available instructional materials to assist faculty in creating a student-centered quantum mechanics (QM) class that engages students while supporting them in developing both sense-making and calculational skills. Our materials are grounded in research on students' understanding of quantum mechanics and are intended to be adaptable to a variety of instructional settings and faculty styles or preferences. They were designed for a spins-first instructional paradigm and include a set of learning goals, concept (“clicker”) questions, pre-lecture surveys, and homework and exam questions, along with example lecture notes from three instructors at three different institutions. In this work, we describe what active learning can look like in the upper-division as well as describe each of the instructional tools and provide a few representative examples. We also discuss how these materials are used at each of our institutions, illustrating how they may be adapted for use at different institutions. 

In this paper, we analyze video recordings of students working on tutorials in Zoom breakout rooms in an upper-division quantum mechanics course. We investigate group behaviors in this virtual environment, including the effects of instructor presence. To this end, we modify the Color Frames coding scheme introduced by Scherr to suit the virtual nature of the interactions. By broadening the frames and allowing for multiple overlapping frames, we are able to describe some group behaviors not otherwise captured. For example, in some instances, students take on an authoritative role in the group, and in other instances, groups engage in overtly casual behavior while nonetheless having on-topic discussions. We observe significant variation in how much time each group spends in each frame, but find that all groups spend some time in all frames. Instructors can be present without dominating or eliminating discussion between students, and their presence need not significantly impact the time students spent in an "informal/friendly'' frame. However, instructor presence significantly reduces time spent working individually. Our findings will support additional research into the dynamics of student discussions during tutorials and aid ongoing development of online tutorials that can, e.g., be assigned for use outside of class. 

Significant attention in the PER community has been paid to student cognition and reasoning processes in undergraduate quantum mechanics. Until recently, however, these same topics have remained largely unexplored in the context of emerging interdisciplinary quantum information science (QIS) courses. We conducted exploratory interviews with 22 students in an upper-division quantum computing course at a large R1 university crosslisted in physics and computer science, as well as 6 graduate students in a similar graduate-level QIS course offered in physics. We classify and analyze students' responses to a pair of questions regarding the fundamental differences between classical and quantum computers. We specifically note two key themes of importance to educators: (1) when reasoning about computational power, students often struggled to distinguish between the relative effects of exponential and linear scaling, resulting in students frequently focusing on distinctions that are arguably better understood as analog-digital than classical-quantum, and (2) introducing the thought experiment of analog classical computers was a powerful tool for helping students develop a more expertlike perspective on the differences between classical and quantum computers. 

Quantum information science (QIS) is an emerging interdisciplinary field at the intersection of physics, computer science, electrical engineering, and mathematics leveraging the laws of quantum mechanics to circumvent classical limitations on information processing. With QIS coursework proliferating across US institutions, including at the undergraduate level, we argue that it is imperative that ethics and social responsibility be incorporated into QIS education from the beginning. We discuss ethical issues of particular relevance to QIS education that educators may wish to incorporate into their curricula. We then report on findings from focus interviews with six faculty who have taught introductory QIS courses, focusing on barriers to and opportunities for incorporation of ethics and social responsibility (ESR) into the QIS classroom. Few faculty had explicitly considered discussion of ethical issues in the classroom prior to the interview, yet instructor attitudes shifted markedly in support of incorporating ESR in the classroom as a result of the interview process itself. Taking into account faculty's perception of obstacles to discussing issues of ESR in coursework, we propose next steps toward making ESR education in the QIS classroom a reality. 

Changing basis is a common task when solving quantum mechanical problems. As part of a research project investigating student understanding of basis and change of basis in quantum mechanics, we developed a tutorial to support students in learning about basis in the context of spin-1/2 systems. We have since created an interactive online version of the basis tutorial as part of a freely available suite of online quantum tutorials called ACE Physics (https://acephysics.net). The ACE Physics tutorials include dynamic guidance elements and, unlike other tutorials, are intended for use outside the classroom without instructor facilitation. After extensive study in an instructor-supported environment, we assigned the ACE Physics basis tutorial as homework in two semesters of upper-division quantum mechanics, and we report on the effectiveness of the activity based on pre-/post-testing and comparison of student exam performance with a similar semester that did not include the activity. We find that the tutorial produces sufficient learning gains to justify continued assignment as a homework problem in our classes. 

As the field of Quantum Information Science (QIS) continues to advance, there is an increased need for a quantum-smart workforce to address the needs of the growing quantum industry. As institutions begin to expand their course offerings, there is a unique opportunity for discipline-based education researchers to have an impact on the curricular and pedagogical choices being made in these courses. As a first step, it is necessary for education researchers to have a representative picture of what QIS education currently looks like. We reviewed recent course catalogues from a large sample of institutions in the United States looking for courses focused on QIS content. Our conservative analysis reveals that roughly a quarter of the institutions we reviewed offer QIS courses. While encouraging for such an emerging field, we found disparities in the types of institutions offering these courses as the vast majority were Doctoral-granting institutions. Additionally, we found that some classifications of minority serving institutions were much less likely to offer a QIS course (for example Historically Black Colleges and Universities or Predominantly Black Institutions), while Asian American and Native American Pacific Islander serving institutions were more likely than the national average to offer a QIS course. These disparities may lead to further racial, socioeconomic, and geographic disparity in the future quantum workforce. We also found that there was no single department that offered a majority of the QIS courses, indicating that the best efforts to improve QIS education will need to consider the multi-disciplinary nature of the field of quantum information science. 

Significant focus in the PER community has been paid to student reasoning in undergraduate quantum mechanics. However, these same topics have remained largely unexplored in the context of emerging interdisciplinary quantum information science (QIS) courses. We conducted 15 exploratory think-aloud interviews with students in an upper-division quantum computing course at a large R1 university cross-listed in the physics and computer science departments. Focusing on responses to one particular problem, we identify two notably consistent problem-solving strategies across students in the context of a particular interview prompt, which we term Naive Measurement Probabilities (NMP) and Virtual Quantum Computer (VQC), respectively. Operating from a resources framework, we interpret these strategies as choices of coherent (and potentially mutually-generative) sets of resources to employ and available actions to perform.