Addressing misconceptions in university physics: A review and experiences from quantum physics educators

TL;DR

This paper reviews strategies for addressing misconceptions in physics education, compares classical and quantum physics approaches, and presents insights from interviews with quantum physics instructors to inform teaching practices.

Contribution

It develops a structural framework for organizing misconceptions literature and applies it to quantum physics, showing that classical strategies are largely effective in quantum contexts.

Findings

Quantum instructors find classical misconception strategies effective.

Similar approaches can be adapted for quantum physics education.

The framework helps compare and select teaching strategies across physics domains.

Abstract

Students often begin physics courses with misconceptions rooted in everyday experience and intuition, which can be resistant to change. While research has identified strategies for addressing misconceptions across physics, it remains unclear whether different domains, like classical and quantum physics, require different approaches. On one hand, quantum concepts are further removed from daily experience, possibly requiring specialized strategies. On the other, all physics must be learned rather than innately understood, and classical physics already contains many counterintuitive ideas, suggesting the same strategies may be equally valid. To explore this question, we first develop a structure to organize the existing literature on addressing misconceptions in physics education. We identify 126 studies, which we group into six categories, three of which include further subcategories. Rather than offering a comprehensive literature review, this scheme provides a structural lens through which to compare how various strategies align. We then take an instructor-centered approach, using our framework to guide interviews with quantum physics instructors. We interview 12 instructors from the University of Waterloo's Institute for Quantum Computing and the Perimeter Institute who have collectively taught over 100 quantum courses. Our findings suggest that quantum physics instructors find strategies similar to those used in classical physics effective for identifying and addressing misconceptions. This highlights the potential to adapt, rather than replace, existing instructional tools to better meet the conceptual challenges of quantum physics. Our work provides practical insights for educators and curriculum designers aiming to support deeper understanding in quantum mechanics.