Students remember what they heard first the misconception and attention wanders for the rest. So, remember, start with just the facts— then go to the misconception. This is the part that is most often missing in traditional teaching. Students need to understand why you want them to change their beliefs.
The key here is to avoid repeating the misconception again. You do not want to make the misinformation increase in its familiarity. As research has shown, that which is more familiar is also more often believed to be true—related to the mere exposure effect 7. So far we have co-activated facts with misconception. Doing so creates a void, and we need to fill that void. But how? There is a gap in knowledge.
Now you must show why the misconception is wrong, and why the known facts provide more fruitful predictions and outcomes when compared to the misinformation. Only in extremely rare cases do adoptive parents have immediate contact with a newborn after birth. Such mothers form strong bonds with their newborns once they are able to have routine contact. Because bonding is a process and the process takes time and it can begin at any time. Here I have filled the gap with the concepts of process and time.
Finally, I go to a fourth step: Inoculation. So what is inoculation and how can you do this? The idea of inoculation stems from studies following World War II and the Korean War when researchers were looking for ways to immunize soldiers taken as prisoners of war against propaganda and persuasion tactics used by their captors.
Think of the medical analogy of an inoculation: exposure to a pathogen at a low level so that its effect is to boost future immunity against the pathogen. You want your students to be immune to future exposure to the misconception. And this is the purpose of inoculation. It is like a vaccination or a shot to protect the new belief from reverting to the old misconception.
See Swire, Ecker and Lewandowsky for how inoculation may mitigate familiarity effects 8. Researchers have developed the acronym FLICC, which stands for Fake experts, Logical fallacies red herring, misrepresentation, jumping to conclusions and false dichotomies , Impossible expectations, Cherry picking and Conspiracy theories. They suggest that when debunking a particular misconception, it is important to apply FLICC in order to maintain the change in beliefs. For example, I can end my lecture on mother-infant bonding with a restatement of the facts, so that these are now part of the most recent memory and then talk a bit about impossible expectations what happens when contact is delayed?
I can also talk about the false dichotomy created between the ideas of immediate versus delayed contact. Develop your own pretest of misconceptions for your course. Activate the misconception but minimize the focus on the misconception. You want to minimize the familiarity backfire effect. For example, students in a science class will often express disappointment that an experiment did not work.
They do not fully understand that experiments are a means of testing ideas and hypotheses, not of arriving at an expected result. To the scientist, an experiment yields a result which needs to be interpreted.
In that sense, each experiment "works," but it may not work as expected. It is useful to review and think about possible misconceptions before teaching a class or laboratory in which new. Use questions and discussion to probe for additional misconceptions. Students will often surprise you with the variety of their preconceptions, so be careful to listen closely to their answers and explanations. You can help students by asking them to give evidence to support their explanations and by revisiting difficult or misunderstood concepts after a few days or weeks.
Misconceptions are often deeply held, largely unexplained, and sometimes strongly defended. To be effective, a science teacher should not underestimate the importance and the persistence of these barriers to true understanding. Confronting them is difficult for the student and the teacher. Some misconceptions can be uncovered by asking students to sketch or describe some object or phenomenon. For example, one might ask students to sketch an atom before doing so on the board. Even students who have a strong high school background might show a small nucleus surrounded by many electrons circling in discrete orbital paths, much like the solar system.
By asking them to draw their own model first and then asking some students to share their answers with the class, a teacher can identify preexisting models and use them to show the need for new models. Students were asked to sketch the air in a sealed flask initially and after half of the air was removed. In this study, fifteen percent of college chemistry students sketched the second flask with regions containing air and other regions containing empty space Benson et al.
Strategies for helping students to overcome their misconceptions are based on research about how we learn Arons, ; Minstrell, The key to success is ensuring that students are constructing or reconstructing a correct framework for their new knowledge. One way of establishing this framework is to have students create "concept maps," an approach pioneered by Novak and Gowin With this technique, students learn to visualize a group of concepts and their interrelationships.
Boxes containing nouns and sometimes adjectives are connected to related terms with a series of lines; prepositions or verbs are superimposed on the connecting lines to help clarify the relationship. A sample concept map is shown in Figure 4. Esiobu and Soyibo reported that students constructing concept maps in cooperative groups show a greater increase in conceptual learning than students working individually, thus the utility of concept mapping may depend on the instructional setting.
Similar results were obtained by Basili and Sanford , who found that cooperative group work on concept-focused tasks had a significant effect in helping college students overcome certain misconceptions in chemistry, even though it did not involve concept maps. Carefully selected demonstrations are one way of helping students overcome misconceptions, and there are a variety of resources available Katz, In the example of a conceptual misunderstanding about gas volume cited in an earlier sidebar, the authors suggest that a demonstration using a colored gas could be very effective in showing students that the gas fills its container.
Helping students to reconstruct their conceptual frame work is a difficult task, and it necessarily takes time away from other activities in a science course.
However, if you decide to make the effort to help students overcome their misconceptions you might try the following methods:. Anticipate the most common misconceptions about the material and be alert for others. Encourage students to test their conceptual frameworks in discussion with other students and by thinking about the evidence and possible tests.
Think about how to address common misconceptions with demonstrations and lab work. This list is not intended to be comprehensive, but instead aims to provide a starting point for those seeking additional reading on this topic.
Cho, H. Kahle, and F. An investigation of high school biology textbooks as sources of misconceptions and difficulties in genetics and some suggestions for teaching genetics. Lawson, A. Formal reasoning ability and misconceptions concerning genetics and natural selection. Teaching 25 9 Nakhleh, M. Why some students don't learn chemistry. Novak, J. De, ed. Ithaca, N.
Peters, P. Even honors students have conceptual difficulties with physics. Physics A Private Universe. Cambridge, Mass. Trowbridge, J. Alternative conception in animal classification: a cross-age study. Teaching 25 7 Wandersee, J. Mintzes, and J. Research on alternative conceptions in science. Gabel, ed. But our brains take lots of shortcuts along the way—we look for patterns and quickly jump to conclusions, and this emphasis on efficiency costs us accuracy.
Learned early, naive theories are incredibly hard to extinguish; even in the face of conflicting information that we may later be exposed to. According to Piaget, cognitive disequilibrium is such an uncomfortable state that we strive to stay in equilibrium by not taking on any new information that conflicts with our present worldview.
New information is more easily learned when it can be related to something that is already known Longfield, Assimilation describes the type of learning that occurs when information can be taken on board without revising our existing cognitive frameworks. This stands in contrast to accommodation, which describes learning where we must revise what we already know or thought we knew to accommodate a new idea. We have a natural tendency to overemphasize information that supports our current theories and discount information that would throw us into disequilibrium Longfield, Two issues are paramount when it comes to misconceptions and education: First, how do we identify when students have them?
Second, having identified them, how should we deal with them? Instructors should begin a new unit prepared to address commonly-held misconceptions that often arise Longfield, The consensus in the literature is that adopting a student-centered pedagogy is the best way to address misconceptions Cakir, ; Longfield, ; Savion, In contrast to traditional, teacher-centered methods, which position the teacher at the literal and figurative center of the room, student-centered methods aim to place students at the center of their learning process, and to empower them as agents of their own learning.
Goldsmith describes Problem-Based Learning and Exploratory Writing activities, and introduces a new teaching method roughly based on the former techniques called Writing Answers to Learn.
What these methods have in common is that, in placing students at the center of the learning process, they engage them in an authentic process of discovery. Research shows that when students are presented with compelling and authentic learning problems, they become more motivated and engaged. In spite of spending years in formal educational settings, misconceptions abound! In a documentary entitled, A Private Universe , Schneps and Sadler report that graduates of Harvard College were no more likely than middle school students to correctly answer questions such as, Why do we have seasons?
As educators, it seems unlikely that we will be able to eliminate misconceptions entirely—the normal ways in which the brain functions supports them. Berrett, D. The Education Digest , Cakir, M. Constructivist approaches to learning in science and their implications for science pedagogy: A literature review. Clement, J.
American Journal of Physics, 50, Confrey, J. A review of the research on student conceptions in mathematics, science, and programming. Review of Research in Education, 16, Cotner, S.
0コメント