Toward thinking quantumly: Student reasoning about the enigma of QM

The physics education research (PER) literature on quantum mechanics (QM) often acknowledges and minimizes what we refer to as the enigma of QM, viewing these aspects of QM as a challenge to overcome, rather than an inherent feature to be leveraged for learning. Using the overlapping theories of knowledge-in-pieces and resource theory as connected to an epistemological framing perspective, we focus on students’ descriptions of the enigma of QM and the epistemological frames that students view as relevant when approaching QM. Data comes from interviews with 10 undergraduate physics students who had learned quantum physics topics across different courses in the curriculum, ranging from sophomore-level modern physics to an advanced undergraduate-level QM course. To elicit students’ ideas on QM, the interview protocol emphasized their perspectives and empowerment when possible. Iterative rounds of qualitative analysis coded the data for how students described enigmatic aspects of QM, along with three epistemological frames students identified as their reasoning strategies: reasoning about scale, reasoning about the connections between QM and mathematics, and reasoning about the connections between QM and classical mechanics. The results document that students are aware that something about QM is unexplainable, an enigma to acknowledge. We argue that acknowledgment of the enigma of QM is a key part of what we refer to as thinking quantumly. Additionally, the epistemological frame of reasoning about scale has not been widely discussed in the QM-PER literature, which students use to distinguish QM from classical mechanics and to explain why mathematical models are needed. These results are important for amplifying students’ voices in how they approach enigmatic aspects of QM. Thus, our results begin to move the QM-PER literature beyond viewing enigmatic aspects of QM as obstacles to be corrected through refined instruction, toward an asset-based orientation as a source of meaningful insights for the learning process.