Student Understanding of Statistical Mechanics

Twenty nine students who had previously taken an undergraduate thermal physics course were interviewed about their basic knowledge about statistical mechanics at the undergraduate level. Of these 29, fourteen were undergraduate students, and fifteen were graduate students at varying stages of their career. This project aimed to identify and compare student understanding of undergraduate level statistical mechanics by using the mental resources that undergraduate and graduate students use when thinking about the basic concepts. The interview prompts consisted of basic problems and questions using concepts from the course, including basic probability and statistics, microstates and macrostates, Einstein solids, and concepts from the canonical ensemble such as the Boltzmann factor, density of states, and the partition function. The interviews were conducted synchronously, both virtually and in-person, depending on the location of the interviewee. The undergraduate students were solicited from across the nation by solicitation emails sent through various universities' Society of Physics Students organizations or thermal physics professors, while the graduate students were mainly recruited from North Carolina State University's graduate department. From the basic counting interview prompts, which were several questions utilizing similar ideas, students seemed unable to gain more than a surface level recognition of the problem and saw them problems involving different types of concepts. When talking about Einstein solids or various aspects of the canonical ensemble, students tended to flounder with either the recall or more rigorous definitions of important terms such as microstates, macrostates, partition function, or the density of states. Overall, it was found that although students at all levels could recognize most of the concepts presented by the prompts, they only possessed a superficial understanding of them at best. From their attempts to reason out answers, especially to more conceptual, open-ended questions, students tended to present an amalgamation of incomplete and/or loosely connected physical ideas, rather than a misunderstanding of the physical concepts involved. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]