Philipp Bitzenbauer

Friedrich-Alexander-University of Erlangen-Nürnberg | FAU · Department of Physics

Algebra is a crucial component of mathematics education as it introduces learners to the mathematical world of modeling relationships and handling abstract quantities. The increasing volume of scholarly work in the field has been analyzed qualitatively in numerous systematic reviews—a quantitative breakdown of the field, however, remains a desidera...

This mixed-methods study examines how pre-service teachers select instructional videos on YouTube for physics teaching. It focuses on the role of surface features that YouTube provides (e.g., likes, views, thumbnails) and the comments underneath the videos in the decision-making process using videos on quantum physics topics as an example. The stud...

Fostering students' understanding of models is a challenge. However, in particular for learning quantum physics an elaborate understanding of models is required. We investigated activities to foster students' functional thinking about (quantum) models in a synchronous online course. The results of an evaluation study (N = 59) showed that the partic...

Research in astronomy education has uncovered that many learners possess limited and fragmented understanding of stars. The corresponding misconceptions manifest in various areas such as star formation, size, the relationship between stars and planets, and their position in space and have been shown to persist across different age groups and educat...

In this paper, we describe the development of a flipped classroom concept for physics teacher education along (a) design criteria from the literature, and (b) students' needs and expectations extracted from an exploratory pre-study ( N = 21). We implemented it in a physics education course at Leipzig University, Germany, and report results of its e...

With the increasing industrial relevance of new quantum technologies, a well-educated quantum workforce becomes increasingly crucial. The foreseeable lack of workforce raises important questions. What are the expectations regarding the future relevance of second-generation quantum technologies? What are the requirements for the workforce in the com...

Learning quantum physics is essential for understanding the physical world. However, learning about quantum phenomena and principles poses a challenge as many of the phenomena that are observed at the quantum level cannot be directly observed or intuitively understood in terms of classical physics or thinking. Models play an important role in learn...

This article reports the findings of a qualitative study that aimed to explore the ideas of 22 preservice physics teachers regarding astronomy concepts both within and beyond the solar system, as well as their understanding of the Nature of Science in the context of astronomy. The study employed a combination of open-ended vignette tasks and rankin...

Although the central role of classical mechanics in physics teacher education is undisputed, divergent interests and perspectives from different disciplinary cultures might exist when thinking about how to best support pre-service teachers' professional development. In this article, we report the results of an exploratory mind map study to investig...

Large language models, such as ChatGPT, have great potential to enhance learning and support teachers, but they must be used with care to tackle limitations and biases. This paper presents two easy-to-implement examples of how ChatGPT can be used in physics classrooms to foster critical thinking skills at the secondary school level. A pilot study (...

The GIREP community on teaching and learning quantum physics and the Education section of the Quantum flagship project of the European Union (QTEdu) have brought together different stakeholders in the field of teaching quantum physics on all levels, including outreach. The goal of QTEdu is to pave the way for the training of the future quantum work...

Physics education research on explanatory videos has experienced a boost in recent years. Due to the vast number of explanatory videos available online, e.g. on YouTube, finding videos of high explaining quality is a challenging task for learners, teachers, and lecturers alike. Prior research on the explaining quality of explanatory videos on class...

Sterne und das Weltall sind bei Lernenden seit jeher hoch im Kurs, wie die Ergebnisse von Interessensstudien zeigen. Empirische Instrumente zur Erhebung von Vorstellungen oder Konzeptverständnissen Lernender zu Konzepten der Astronomie sind jedoch rar. Im vorgestellten Projekt wird die Entwicklung und Pilotierung von solchen Instrumenten für den de...

Previous research has shown that phenomenological approaches in early optics education might be superior to traditional model-based instruction based on the light ray realm with regards to fostering students' conceptual understanding of basic optics topics. However, it remains open to date which learning difficulties students encounter when being i...

Quantum technologies have outgrown mere fundamental research in laboratories over recent years, and will facilitate more and more potentially disruptive applications in a wide range of fields in the future. In foresight, qualification opportunities need to be implemented in order to train qualified specialists, referred to as the future quantum wor...

Quantum physics is the basis for many technologies that are a fundamental part of our daily lives (e.g., lasers) or that may become so in the future (e.g., quantum cryptography and quantum computing). Because of this, quantum physics is now a central aspect of many countries’ secondary school curricula. In this article, we present the design and st...

Prior research has shown that many secondary school students have an insufficient conceptual understanding of basic optics concepts even after formal instruction. In this paper, we empirically investigate whether a phenomenological approach might be a sensible alternative to traditional model-based instruction of introductory optics in early physic...

We report an exploratory interview study into students’ conceptions of photons developed by learners introduced to a QED model of photons as part of an introductory course in quantum physics at the secondary school level. By combining qualitative and quantitative research methods, we extract types of students’ imaginations about photons. Furthermor...

Recent research has boosted the inclusion of introductory group theory into secondary and undergraduate mathematics education due to manifold potentials, e.g., with regards to the promotion of students’ abstract thinking. However, in addition to research on cognitive processes, learners’ affective characteristics have largely remained unexplored in...

With the increasing industrial relevance of new quantum technologies, a well educated quantum workforce becomes increasingly crucial and raises important questions. What are the expectations regarding the future relevance of second generation quantum technologies? And what are the requirements for the workforce in the coming quantum industry? What...

In an earlier contribution to Education Sciences we presented a new concept inventory to assess students’ conceptual understanding of introductory group theory—the CI2GT. This concept inventory is now leveraged in a pretest-post-test design with N=143 pre-service teachers to enrich this body of work with quantitative results. On the one hand, our f...

Physics education research on explanatory videos has experienced a boost in recent years. Due to the vast number of explanatory videos available online, e.g. on YouTube, finding videos of high explaining quality is a challenging task for learners, teachers, and lecturers alike. Prior research on the explaining quality of explanatory videos on class...

We discuss the term teacher identity and its significance for teacher education and teachers’ professional development. From the literature, we derive a definition of the term that associates teacher identity with first- and third-person narratives. In this way, the construct teacher identity becomes operationalizable in empirical studies: Therefor...

With new quantum technologies and new applications comes a new need for specialists, the new quantum workforce. This brings new challenges for education that the typical quantum mechanics courses for physicists do not address. Requirements for the future quantum workforce need to be collected and training programmes created. In between, there shoul...

Prior research has shown how incorporating group theory into upper secondary school or undergraduate mathematics education may positively impact learners’ conceptual understanding of mathematics in general and algebraic concepts in particular. Despite a recently increasing number of empirical research into student learning of introductory group the...

Why does a raindrop on a window pane show an image of the environment that is turned upside-down? And why does vision go blurry underwater, but is perfectly clear with diving goggles? Our everyday life is rich in optical phenomena. Unfortunately, these phenomena often play a subordinate role in Optics teaching, compared to ray constructions or mech...

In an earlier contribution to Mathematics, we presented a new teaching concept for abstract algebra in secondary school mathematics, and we discussed findings from mathematics education research indicating that our concept could be used as a promising resource to foster students’ algebraic thinking. In accordance with the Design-Based Research fram...

This article reports on the development and piloting of a German version of a concept test to assess students’ conceptual knowledge of density. The concept test was administered in paper-pencil format to 222 German secondary school students as a post-test after instruction in all relevant concepts of density. We provide a psychometric characterizat...

A poorly elaborated learner’s understanding of models has been reported to be one of the major sources for learning difficulties in the quantum domain. To be able to provide physics education in schools with evidence as to how this problem can be tackled, a deeper theoretical understanding of the structure of learners’ mental models in quantum phys...

In this paper, we present a novel concept for an abstract algebra course at the secondary school level. Against the backdrop of findings from mathematics education research, we discuss benefits that arise from teaching abstract algebra to secondary school students. We derive suitable content items as well as educational ideas on how to implement th...

Quantum physics is an essential field of science education research, which reflects the high relevance of research on quantum physics and its technologies all around the globe. In this paper, we report on a bibliometric analysis of the science education research community’s scientific output in the area of quantum physics in the period from 2000 to...

No consensus has been reached so far concerning the key topics on quantum physics suitable for secondary school teaching, despite comprehensive research. We identified the variety of associations with quantum physics among professionals as a potential cause. From an explorative mind map study with N = 29 physics researchers, we derive six subject-s...

Die Unterrichtspraxis in allen Fächern wird maßgeblich durch das Selbstverständnis und die Persönlichkeit von Lehrkräften bestimmt. Mit dem Begriff teacher identity ist der Versuch verbunden, diese beiden Aspekte zusammenzuführen, allerdings existiert eine anhaltende Debatte über eine praxistaugliche Definition dieses Begriffs. Wir greifen diese Pr...

In this paper, we focus on two particularly problematic concepts in teaching mathematics: the complex unit i and angles. These concepts are naturally linked via De Moivre’s theorem but are independently misused in numerous contexts. We present definitions, notations, and ways of speaking about these terms from mathematics education that are not val...

We conducted a quasiexperimental study in order to investigate the effect of a teaching concept on quantum physics based on coincidence and correlation experiments with heralded photons on preuniversity students' conceptions of quantum physics (experimental group, N = 150). We compare the results with the traditional curriculum's effect (control gr...

In an earlier contribution in Physics Education (Bitzenbauer and Meyn 2020 Phys. Educ. 55 055031), we presented a new teaching sequence on quantum optics on the secondary school level, and we reported on promising results of a first pilot study concerning its learning effectiveness. In the sense of design-based research, the developed teaching mate...

Mit den neuen Quantentechnologien, den QT 2.0, ergeben sich spezielle Anforderungen an die Fachkräfte, die mit diesen arbeiten werden. Ziel der vorgestellten Delphi-Studie ist die Ermittlung von Kompetenzen für und Anforderungen an die künftigen Quanten-Fachkräfte. Damit bilden die Ergebnisse dieser Delphi-Studie die Basis für die Entwicklung eines...

This article reports the development and validation of a test instrument to assess secondary school students' declarative quantum optics knowledge. With that, we respond to modern developments from physics education research: Numerous researchers propose quantum optics-based introductory courses in quantum physics, focusing on experiments with hera...

Physics teachers are often faced with the challenge of having to set up difficult experiments, or they have to consciously manipulate parameters in order to be able to demonstrate a phenomenon convincingly. Comprehensive laboratory courses are standard procedure in any study program for prospective physics teachers. However, many students, even aft...

Jüngste Ergebnisse der Beforschung gängiger Modellvorstellungen zu Elektronen in der Atomhülle von Ubben und Heusler legen zwei unabhängige Faktoren des Modellverständnisses Lernender nahe: die Gestalttreue und die Funktionalitätstreue. Mit diesen beiden Faktoren wird die Beschreibung von Typen des physikalischen Modellverständnisses ermöglicht. In...

In Kapitel 9 haben wir uns mit Vektorräumen beschäftigt. Um in diesen Vektorräumen geometrische Betrachtungen anstellen zu können, ist es zunächst einmal notwendig, einen Längenbegriff zu definieren. Ein weiterer offener Punkt, der hinsichtlich der Vektorraumstruktur unbefriedigend ist, ist der einer Multiplikation ʘ : V × V → \({\mathbb{K}}\) von...

Ein lineares Gleichungssystem in \(\mathcal{m}\) Variablen \(x\)1; :::;\(x\)m \(\in \) K ist eine Menge von \(\mathcal{n}\) \(\in \) \({\mathbb{N}}\) linearen Gleichungen der Gestalt

Oft wird die Integration als die Umkehrung der Differentiation bezeichnet. Konzeptuell sind die Ableitung und das Integral aber verschieden: Während die Ableitung einer Funktion lokal als ein Grenzwert definiert ist, bedeutet Integralbestimmung auch Produktsummenbildung.

Dieses Lehrbuch bietet, was sich jeder Prüfungskandidat des Staatsexamens im Fach Mathematik für das Lehramt an Grund-, Mittel- oder Realschulen wünscht: Egal, ob der rasche Blick auf eine Definition oder die Suche nach einem anschaulichen Beispiel, mit dem formale Sätze verständlich werden. Die prüfungsrelevanten Themen für das Staatsexamen in Ma...

Die steigende Relevanz von Quantentechnologien in Deutschland (s. z. B. Acatech IMPULS; Konjunkturpaket der Bundesregierung) und Europa (s. z. B. Quantum Flagship) stellt die (universitäre) Ausbildung von Fachkräften in diesem Bereich vor neue Herausforderungen – nicht nur in der Physik, sondern auch in den Ingenieurwissenschaften. Ein Ziel des eur...

Background: Quantum physics is both a highly topical and challenging topic of physics education. Learning quantum physics is inherently difficult because it is unimaginative, counterintuitive and fundamentally different from what learners know from their everyday life and classical physics. The results of recent studies underline that students are...

Die Quantenphysik bildet schon heute das Fundament zahlreicher aktueller Technologien. Zukünftige Quantentechnologien, wie Quantencomputer, werden sowohl in der Industrie als auch für die Gesellschaft an Bedeutung gewinnen. In vielen nationalen und internationalen Schulcurricula ist die Quantenphysik als Thema für den Physikunterricht mittlerweile...

Analogiebildung ist ein methodisches Werkzeug zur Förderung naturwissenschaftlicher Lernpro-zesse. Für das Erlanger Unterrichtskonzept zur Quantenoptik wurde zur Vermittlung des Lernbereichs Einzelphotonendetektoren eine Analogie erarbeitet. Die Funktionsweise der Einzelphotonendetektoren wird dabei mit dem Entstehen und Abgehen von Schneelawinen v...

In der empirischen Unterrichtsforschung wird im Kontext von Testentwicklung oft von der Validierung eines Testinstruments gesprochen. Die Debatte über das Testgütekriterium Validität führte zu einer Verschiebung der Auffassung von Validität. Heute ist weniger von der Validität als Eigenschaft eines Tests die Rede. Vielmehr steht eine valide Testwer...

Quantentechnologien gewinnen rasant an Bedeutung und "Quantum Awareness" wird auch im In-genieurwesen immer wichtiger. Damit ergeben sich in der universitären Lehre neue Herausforde-rungen zur Ausbildung von "Quantum Engineers". Hier setzt das Projekt an: Es werden Kenntnisse und Kompetenzen im Bereich der Quanteninformationstechnologien identifizi...

Mit dem Erlanger Unterrichtskonzept zur Quantenoptik wird das Ziel verfolgt, eine moderne Sichtweise auf die Quantenphysik zu vermitteln. Lernende sollen anschlussfähiges Wissen bis hin zu den Wesenszügen der Quantenphysik aufbauen. Im Rahmen einer summativen Evaluation mit Schülerinnen und Schülern der gymnasialen Oberstufe wird das Konzept evalui...

In this article, an approach to integrate contemporary quantum physics into secondary school teaching is presented. The Erlanger concept on quantum optics provides an experimental-based guideway to aspects of modern quantum physics. We avoid the traditional historical approach in order to overcome the lack of modern concepts of quantum physics. In...

Evaluation eines Unterrichtskonzepts zur Quantenoptik mit Einzelphotonenexperimenten -Ergebnisse einer Pilotstudie

Quantenphysik unterscheidet sich von der klassischen Physik fundamental: Während Beobachtungen mechanischer Vorgänge einfach möglich sind und sich durch den Beobachtungsprozess kein Einluss auf den Vorgang ergibt, sind vergleichbare Beobachtungen in der Quantenphysik nicht möglich, da jeder Messprozess den Zustand eines Quantensystems ändert . Weil...