Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Characterizations Of Student, Instructor, And Textbook Discourse Related To Basis And Change Of Basis In Quantum Mechanics, Kaitlyn Stephens Serbin, Megan Wawro, Rebecah Storms

School of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences Faculty Publications and Presentations

Communities develop social languages in which utterances take on culturally specific situated meanings. As physics students interact in their classroom, they can learn the broader physics community’s social language by co-constructing meanings with their instructors. We provide an exposition of a systematic and productive use of idiosyncratic, socially acquired language in two classroom communities that we consider to be subcultures of the broader community of physicists. We perform a discourse analysis on twelve quantum mechanics students, two instructors, and the course text related to statements about basis and change of basis within a spin-½ probability problem. We classify the utterances’ …