MEASUREMENT UNCERTAINTY IN UNDERGRADUATE PHYSICS STUDENT MISCONCEPTIONS AND POINTS OF DIFFICULTY

摘要

One key concept in physics is that a measurement always has an associated uncertainty. This paper examines several observed student misconceptions about this concept, discusses the difficulties encountered in overcoming these misconceptions, and suggests some possible alternative solutions. Prior work in this area by Saalih Allie and Andy Buffler of the University of Capetown and Fred Lubbin of the University of York has shown that students often enter college with the notion that scientific measurements are exact and that "measurement error" is due to a fault on the part of the experimenter. Students also often believe that uncertainty is a concept that arises in physics only in the context of quantum mechanics and have misunderstandings of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle that can be difficult to overcome. These problems are often exacerbated by misconceptions regarding statistics. Even when students in introductory physics classes are able to perform basic statistical calculations, they frequently have weak conceptual understanding of probability and statistics. In particular, they struggle to apply statistics to the interpretation of experimental results. In this paper, we survey solutions to these problems that have been proposed by authors in the past and suggest a possible approach that combines these solutions with ideas on teaching statistics and best practices from physics education research.