@article{2105,
  author = {L. Carr and S. McKagan},
  title = {Graduate quantum mechanics reform},
  abstract = {<p>We address four main areas in which&nbsp;graduate&nbsp;quantum mechanics&nbsp;education can be improved: course content,&nbsp;textbook,&nbsp;teaching methods, and assessment tools. We report on a three year longitudinal study at the Colorado School of Mines using innovations in all these areas. In particular, we have modified the content of the course to reflect progress in the field of&nbsp;quantum mechanics&nbsp;over the last&nbsp;50years50years, used&nbsp;textbooks&nbsp;that include such content, incorporated a variety of teaching techniques based on&nbsp;physics&nbsp;education research, and used a variety of assessment tools to study the effectiveness of these reforms. We present a new assessment tool, the&nbsp;Graduate&nbsp;Quantum Mechanics&nbsp;Conceptual Survey, and further testing of a previously developed assessment tool, the&nbsp;Quantum Mechanics&nbsp;Conceptual Survey. We find that&nbsp;graduate&nbsp;students respond well to research-based techniques that have been tested mainly in introductory courses, and that they learn much of the new content introduced in each version of the course. We also find that students’ ability to answer conceptual questions about&nbsp;graduate&nbsp;quantum mechanics&nbsp;is highly correlated with their ability to solve calculational problems on the same topics. In contrast, we find that students’ understanding of basic&nbsp;undergraduate&nbsp;quantum mechanics&nbsp;concepts at the modern&nbsp;physics&nbsp;level is not improved by instruction at the&nbsp;graduate&nbsp;level.<a name="_i1"></a></p>
},
  year = {2009},
  journal = {American Journal of Physics},
  volume = {77},
  month = {2009-03},
  doi = {10.1119/1.3079689},
  note = {JILA Pub. 8200},
}