Supporting physics teaching with research-based resources

We are three PER research faculty teaching at three very different institutions - different in class sizes and setups, student demographics, institutional research-focus - but all interested in helping undergraduates learn Quantum Mechanics!
We have all taught a variety of quantum courses for many years, and recently have all converged on a "spins-first" approach (following David McIntyre's Quantum Mechanics text).  

The materials you will find here are not meant to be taken as givens, this is not a "fixed curriculum" that you are supposed to fully adopt (or reject). We hope that you will be inspired by some of the activities, notes, concept-tests, homeworks and more, and will borrow and adapt them for your own situation and students. We do not all use exactly the same materials ourselves (in some cases you will find "variants" for smaller or larger groups, e.g.)

We have borrowed where we can from PER literature on Quantum Mechanics (and tried - but apologize up front where we occasionally have failed - to appropriately credit the the hard development work of others!) We do not claim that these materials are "Research-validated" (they are still under development!), but cheerfully present sometimes half-baked or partially-tested materials that we might argue are "research-based", a vaguer but perhaps more realistic description. 

We welcome feedback and suggestions. If you make significant changes or additions,  and particularly if you have classroom evidence that suggests it works well - let us know. We hope someday this site will be flexible enough to allow for community-sharing of new resources, and will work towards making that happen. (See contact information at the bottom of the page) 

Here you will find all our materials organized by topic. We follow a spins-first curriculum labeled with chapters of McIntyre's Quantum Mechanics textbook (but the materials can easily be adapted for any spins-first curriculum, and with a little more significant reorganization, to a "wave functions first" curriculum).

Within each content area you will find separate folders with: 
Clicker questions, Sample Exam questions, Sample Homework Questions, our Lecture Notes (and lecture powerpoints), Pre-lecture warmup questions, and Tutorials/activities with instructor guides and pretests. 

Topics in the above download include :
0) Background/Modern Physics
1) Stern-Gerlach experiments
2) Operators and Measurements
3) Schrodinger Time Evolution
4) Quantum entanglement (and Quantum computation, also in Ch 16) 
5) Spatial wave functions and particle in a box
6) Unbound states
7) Angular momentum
8) Hydrogen atom
16) Quantum Computation

Here you can download smaller sub-collections of selected materials (for the entire semester). 

For some (beta) versions of many of the Tutorials online, please visit
https://acephysics.net/

The QMCA (Quantum Mechanics Conceptual Assessment) is our research-based end of term instrument designed to get a broad sense of student learning of many of the key concepts associated with our learning goals. You can download it from our PhysPort assessment page. (Contact Steven.Pollock@colorado.edu if you want to use an online version. Depending on timing constraints, we may be able to score it for you.)

We ask that, like any research-based assessment, you avoid using this as a graded assignment. Please do not use the individual QMCA questions on exams or other assignments, and avoid posting solutions (or allowing students to take hard copies of the assessment with them.)  

We held a small conference in Fall 2017 with faculty from around the country to discuss some of our learning goals in middle-level Quantum. The document below contains a brief summary of those goals, with links to more resources.