New perspectives on student reasoning about measurement uncertainty: More or better data

TL;DR

This study explores how advanced physics students think about measurement uncertainty in classical and quantum experiments, focusing on their reasoning about data quantity and quality and revealing limitations of simple binary perspectives.

Contribution

It provides new insights into students' conceptual understanding of uncertainty across different experimental contexts, highlighting limitations of point- and set-like reasoning.

Findings

Students' reasoning about uncertainty varies across classical and quantum contexts.

Students often exhibit limitations in binary point- and set-like thinking.

The study identifies specific misconceptions about data collection and uncertainty.

Abstract

Uncertainty is an important and fundamental concept in physics education. Students are often first exposed to uncertainty in introductory labs, expand their knowledge across lab courses, and then are introduced to quantum mechanical uncertainty in upper-division courses. This study is part of a larger project evaluating student thinking about uncertainty across these contexts. In this research, we investigate advanced physics student thinking about uncertainty by asking them conceptual questions about how a hypothetical distribution of measurements would change if `more' or `better' data were collected in four different experimental scenarios. The scenarios include both classical and quantum experiments, as well as experiments that theoretically result in an expected single value or an expected distribution. This investigation is motivated by our goal of finding insights into students' potential point- and set-like thinking about uncertainty and of shining light on the limitations of those binary paradigms.