Investigating the dynamics of ontological reasoning in quantum physics

The ontologies students use—how they reason about what kind of a thing a given entity is—impact the way they learn physics. We investigate students’ capacities for flexible use of ontologies in a modern physics context, focusing on reasoning around photons and electrons for three canonical topics in introductory quantum physics (double slit experiment, Mach-Zehnder interferometer, quantum tunneling). We present a description of a framework that identifies three possible ontological structures: unitary (applying a single stable ontology), parallel (switching back and forth between multiple ontologies), and blended (constructing a novel ontology by blending multiple input ontologies). We demonstrate the utility of the framework by coding individual homework, exam, and survey responses from a representative sample of a modern physics course. We demonstrate that students use a variety of ontologies and ontological structures across entities and topic areas, even when not explicitly prompted to do so. Additionally, we find that the wording and framing of the questions impact students’ use of ontologies, and present examples to demonstrate how the wording, framing, and content of prompts can intersect to impact students’ ontology use.