Student reasoning about experimental measurement uncertainty in quantum versus classical mechanics, and deterministic versus probabilistic systems.

Recent studies on how students think about uncertainty in the context of quantum versus classical mechanics have suggested that students express varied perceptions of uncertainty depending on context. We developed a new survey to study student thinking about fictitious data distributions from both quantum and classical, and both deterministic and probabilistic laboratory experiments. To analyze these interpretations we asked students to explain how and why the distributions might change if 100 more students or a professional experimenter had performed the experiment and developed a coding scheme to classify their responses. In this presentation, I will describe the emerging results about the ways in which student thinking about measurement uncertainty varies between classical and quantum, and between deterministic and probabilistic measurement contexts.