PHY 430: Quantum Mechanics

PHY 430 is a junior/senior level course in quantum mechanics for physics majors. The material covered in the course is pretty standard for this level (I use the Griffiths text, which is probably the most common one used for this course, and cover most of the first half of the book). I have struggled to incorporate active-learning into this course because quantum mechanics is so counter-intuitive. Because the class focuses on the mathematical formalism the material is highly technical. I do work in some discussion of the experimental basis of quantum mechanics, as well as some issues regarding the interpretation of the theory - but these come mostly in the form of writing assignments (PHY 430 is a writing-intensive course, part of Berry's Writing-Across-the-Curriculum program).

This past semester (Spring 2009) when I taught PHY 430 I finally decided to start working in some active learning. At that point PHY 430 was the only class I taught where I spent most of class time lecturing - and I didn't like the fact that I was still lecturing in that class. So during the semester I managed to create a series of group tutorials for the students to complete in class. We did these tutorials for a little over half of the class periods. One tutorial was based on some Open Source Physics simulations created by Wolfgang Christian and Mario Belloni of Davidson College. I created the rest of the tutorials by going through my lecture notes from the last time I taught Quantum Mechanics and deciding which steps in the derivations/examples the students could do on their own. So I still lectured a fair bit (just under half the class periods), and I gave them a lot in the tutorials - but they spent most of their class time DOING quantum mechanics rather than hearing me talk about it.

It went surprisingly well. The students were able to get through the material I wanted them to get through. We had a couple of delays when tutorials took longer than I had anticipated, but we were able to catch up later on. And overall I think the students learned the material very well. Their performance on tests was quite good. It was a small class (6 students) so it's hard to say if this would have worked with a larger class - but I was pretty happy with it on the whole.

The tutorials I created are not fantastic. I would say they are definitely not as good as the materials I have created for PHY 101 or AST 120. But I think the tutorials are more effective than lectures. Since, for the most part, the tutorials covered exactly the same material as my lecture notes would have I didn't really have to sacrifice any "coverage" in order to include more active learning. I'd like to continue improving the tutorials, so that they can lead the students to genuine insight instead of just a formal understanding of how quantum mechanics is done. Hopefully I can make tutorials (or some kind of active learning method) a bigger part of the course in the future. But I'm definitely not going back to all lecture.