Investigating students’ mental models about the quantization of light, energy, and angular momentum

Abstract

This paper is the first part of a multiphase study examining students' mental models about the quantization of physical observables-light, energy, and angular momentum.Thirty-one second-year physics and physics education college students who were taking a modern physics course participated in the study.The qualitative analysis of data revealed six variations in students' mental models about the quantization of physical observables: scientific model, primitive scientific model, shredding model, alternating model, integrative model, and evolution model.These models were determined to be context dependent.In addition, some students are in a mixed-model state where they use multiple mental models in explaining a phenomenon and use these models inconsistently.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 66 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.