A study of social representations of quantum physics held by high school students through numerical and written word association tests

Abstract

This paper presents findings of a preliminary research on possible social representations of quantumtheory that might being shared by high school students. Its purpose was to identify and tocharacterize these social representations through numerical and written word association tests(NWAT and WWAT) and multidimensional scaling (MDS) techniques of analysis. Theunderstanding of such representations might provide hints of the influence of the media on thestudents' ideas regarding scientific concepts. In school learning, these ideas are part of the students'prior knowledge, which, when these ideas act as subsumers, can play a key role, not necessarily inthe sense of helping, in the occurrence of meaningful learning of quantum mechanics.