PROCEEDINGS OF THE 23RD ANNUAL CONFERENCE ON RESEARCH IN UNDERGRADUATE MATHEMATICS EDUCATION
2020
Boston, Massachusetts
Students’ language about basis and change of basis in a quantum mechanics problem
Page: 529
We explored how 12 quantum mechanics students from two universities discussed basis and change of basis as they performed probability tasks, one of which required a change of basis. We found that students’ utterances referred to a person, a calculation, or a vector being in a basis, or a vector being written in a basis. Students discussed change of basis as changing the form of a vector, writing the vector in another form, making a vector become a new vector, and switching bases. We performed a discourse analysis on the situated meanings of students’ phrases.