Student Misconceptions

Instructional Principle: Misconceptions interfere with learning. If a teacher knows what misconceptions are held by a student, the learner can often be helped to overcome these misconceptions and develop a correct understanding of the topic.

Students use prior knowledge as an important basis for new learning. When this prior knowledge consists of accurate or useful understandings, it is an important facilitator of new learning. However, students often approach educational topics with misconceptions, and these false understandings seriously disrupt learning even among the students within a single class.

A further problem is that the precise nature of misconceptions may vary greatly. Teachers who assume all learners in a class are ready to benefit from a standard presentation may be guilty of a serious mistake.

When students have misconceptions about a topic, their status is often worse than if they thought they knew nothing at all about the subject under consideration. The false information transfers negatively to the instructional unit and makes it even more difficult for the learner to reach instructional objectives. Good teachers identify false conceptions and help students overcome them, so that learning may proceed effectively.

With regard to the phases of learning, misconceptions cause problems at phase 3 (retreival to working memory) and phase 4 (selective perception). That is, when the learner brings to bear previous information to form a context through which to process the new information, this context is incorrect, and the learning process is jeopardized - even if the presentation of information is correct and the student wants to learn. This is an extremely serious problem, because when a misconception is present this retrieval phase is likely to happen so rapidly and automatically that the learner is not even aware that a problem has occurred.

The failure at phase 3 leads directly to a failure at phase 4. During the phase of selective perception, the learner looks at the specific elements of the instructional presentation that are important. This is probably the most crucial part of the learning process; if the learner focuses on the wrong elements, learning is almost certainly going to fail. Yet if a misconception has caused the learner to activate the wrong context, then it is almost certain that this focus will be on the wrong elements of the presentation.

When students look at the wrong elements, they either remain confused or learn actively incorrect infromation. However, if students are lucky, they will realize during the selective perception phase that something has gone awry. When this happens, they loop back to the retrieval to working memory phase and bring the proper context to bear on the task at hand.

Perhaps the easiest way to understand the impact of misconceptions is to examine a ssituation in which an author deliberately evokes them. For example, in a good mystery novel or movie the author tries to set up the context so that the reader or viewer will mistakenly believe that an innocent person has "done it." Therefore, when we encounter a new piece of information, we blithely fit it into our current misconception, and we are led further and further away from the truth. Later, when the Master Detective cracks the case, we are taken back in our minds to where the misconception occurred. "Aha!" we say; "now this whole thing makes sense to me." In terms of learning theory, our misconception caused us automatically to activate the wrong information information and to selectively perceive the new information incorrectly. Once we realized that our mistake, then we activated the proper information, focused on what we should have focused on in the first place, and understood the crime and its solution perfectly.

 

Effective teachers deal with misconceptions through strategies such as the following:

• Asking students questions that require them to clarify their beliefs and understandings.
  
  
• When it is proper to do so, following these initial questions with further questions designed to evoke and clarify the nature of the misconceptions.
  
  
• Presenting examples of phenomena that students cannot possibly explain by using their current (misconceived) understandings.
  
  
• Helping the students focus on concepts that will accurately explain the phenomena under consideration.
  
  
• Engaging students in discussions regard the pros and cons of the previous versus the new understanding.
  
  
• Pointing out explicit differences between their misconception and the better explanation.
  
  
• Convinvingly showing that a different conception of events and idea will enable them to understand things more productively than would be poissible if they continued with their previous misconception.

Note that the above strategies do not require a particular style of instruction. That is, they can be incorporated into either a good lecture or a good discovery lesson. The important point is that when misconceptions occur, they are likely to interfere with learning, unless the learners confront and overcome them.

Computerized programs can help overcome misconceptions by delivering any of the strategies listed above. In many cases, this means that a good teacher will use a program to display phenomena and then will lead a discussion in which the teacher and students (without further assistance from the computer) will overcome the misconcption. In other cases, the computer may prompt the student to reveal a misconception and then automatically supply instruction to help overcome that misunderstanding.

Figures 3.1a and 3.1b show a good example of a genetics tutorial that deals effectively with a misconception. In Figure 3.1 the student is presented with a simple problem about monohybrid crosses. Let's assume the student has a misconception and believes that one half of the offspring will have spherical seeds. In that case the computer will automatically take the student to Figure 3.1b.

Figure 3.1a. The set-up screen, in which the learner is being prompted to display a misconception regarding monohybrid crosses.

Note that in Figure 3.1a the program is "setting the learner up." That is, the computer has a tutorial all set up to give instruction and will reveal this tutorial to anyone who displays this misconception. The programmer's thinking is that it is pointless to put students through the whole tutorial unless they understand this basic information, including how to use a Punnett square (which appears as part of the tutorial in Figure 3.1b); and so this "trap" has been laid to screen out learners who hold misconceptions on this topic.

Figure 3.1b. The follow-up screen, which tis presented only if the learner reveals a misconception during Figure 3.1a. {Note that the tutorial is only partially presented in this figure.}

The role of the computer in dealing with misconceptions is similar to its role in dealing with prerequisite knowledge (discussed next). The computer can help determine what misconceptions are held by a student and then provide remedial instruction to overcome them.

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