Can misconceptions in physics pedagogy be modelled with quantum cognition?

Under the framework of conceptual change, misconceptions are viewed as incorrect ideas to be replaced. This perspective has many issues, the main one being that it fails to account for the context-dependent nature of reasoning. This project will follow the framework of representational pluralism, which suggests students can hold multiple, often conflicting representations constructed from smaller intuitive building blocks known as phenomenological primitives (p-prims). This framework allows us to use a quantum cognitive approach to model these representations probabilistically as superposed states of incompatible concept pairs. After reviewing the literature, we developed a model of quantum cognition representing concepts as vectors in a Hilbert space. This was applied to several common misconceptions using theoretical values for their projections and then considered contextually for different question phrasing. The model illustrates how misconceptions can emerge, coexist with ‘correct’ ideas, and shift depending on context.