2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Quantum technology is a quickly growing area of focus for future technological innovation. As such, it is important to have an available and properly educated workforce that can push developments forward. Our contribution to cultivating such a workforce took on the challenge of bringing quantum education into the middle school classroom. This paper briefly presents a science and technology aligned curriculum that infuses lessons on quantum randomness into radioactive decay teaching and learning content. Over the course of two years, we recruited and trained 10 teachers, across seven different schools in our local area, to implement our curriculum. It was taught once per year at each participating teacher’s science classroom, for two years in a row. To assess the impact and effectiveness of our curriculum, we investigated how engaging the curriculum was to students as well as their learning of quantum randomness. To assess these two things, we had teachers administer an engagement survey and a conceptual assessment to students in a pre-/post-test manner. The engagement survey measured engagement in four dimensions: behavioral, emotional, social, and cognitive. The conceptual assessment survey assessed quantum and non-quantum concepts, though of interest to this paper are the quantum assessment items only. In the first year, we collected 872 paired responses, and in the second year, we collected 845 paired responses. To analyze this data, we used paired, one-tailed t-tests. For the first-year data set, we found statistically significant differences in emotional, social, and cognitive engagement and in performance on the quantum questions of conceptual assessment. For the second-year data set, we found statistically significant differences in emotional and social engagement and in performance on the quantum questions of conceptual assessment. The results by individual year demonstrate that our quantum randomness infused science and technology-related curriculum is engaging in a couple dimensions and also leads to learning of concepts regarding quantum randomness. Looking at the results together, it can be seen that the impact and effectiveness of the curriculum is consistent across the data sets, even though the students were different each year. Hopefully, this study can inspire more contemporary science education curricula designed either in kind or with a different framework, though all with the same goal to bring conceptual quantum education to middle school classrooms.