Comparing Chinese And American Students' Performance In Quantum Mechanics

This paper focuses on the comparison of Chinese and American students'understanding on the concepts of quantum mechanics.There were studies which showed that Chinese students performed better than American students on FCI and BEMA.One of the most accepted explanations was Chinese students got hard training in high school.The paper chose QM to test because it could eliminate the impact of their experience in high school.The author selected 5 universities in China and the US respectively.Since QM courses are usually set to grade 3-students whose major is physics,the study aimed at undergraduate students.This paper used Quantum Mechanics Survey as test material and administrated QMS to about 450 undergraduate students.According to the data,the author found that Chinese students had a significant difference with American students on quantum mechanics QM.However,the same-level Chinese students had a stable performance while American students had a huge fluctuation on their scores.This research investigated 9 kinds of concepts.One question of Role of the Hamiltonian,Stationary and non-s tat ionary states and Bound/scattering states would be analyzed respectively since students had most difference on them.The results showed that Chinese students were more likely to transfer some conclusions from classical physics to QM.Students had similar mistake that they didn' t realize the Ep of the well bottom must be smaller than that at infinity which is one of the requests to allow for bound states.On“Stationary and non-stationary states",students always believed that the wave-function of the old ground state would eventually evolve into a new stationary state and didn' t realize that if the initial state is not a stationary state of the new system,the time evolution would not cause it evolve into a stationary state of the new system.The number of students who has the first mistake arc the the same and there are more Chinese students had the second mistake than American students.