Student perception and benefits of visual-graphical qubit representations

Determine how students perceive and benefit from visual-graphical qubit representations in quantum physics learning, clarifying learners’ perceptions of representations such as the Bloch sphere and the Quantum Bead and the extent to which these representations support learning.

Background

A prior expert rating identified 16 features of visual-graphical qubit representations and suggested that different representations may activate different learning mechanisms. While these ratings provided hypotheses about representational affordances, they did not directly address learners’ perceptions or how much students benefit from the representations in practice.

This paper compared the Bloch sphere and the Quantum Bead in outcome and process measures, but the paper explicitly flags that students’ actual perception of such representations and the nature of the benefits remain unclear, motivating further investigation beyond expert judgments.