Misconceptions Die Hard

Although we discussed misconceptions in class last Thursday, and while the Private Universe video was certainly eye-opening, I felt that the actual analysis and concrete evidence in this article were what really made this issue apparent to me.

To me, the evidence of misconceptions that remain across-the-board from elementary school through college are indicative of the culture of schooling we've grown so accustomed to. That culture is largely composed of fast memorization of facts to pass a test, and then the immediate discarding of those facts after the summative assessment has been completed. We as students are trained to quickly learn what we need to know, and we never really realize that we're supposed to be learning to understand; we're supposed to be learning to remember.

Some of the data showed that a very small (as in, 2%) of students "re-learned" these basic facts after having enrolled in a few college-level science courses - but does that 2% really mean anything? Teachers cannot hold the future educators of their current students accountable for re-teaching the most basic of facts (for example, that 1 lb = 1 lb, no matter how you manipulate it). I found it disheartening that the terminology changed from simple to complex wording as students grew older, but that understanding remained largely unchanged. It seemed as if these students just heard these words in passing, gained a very rudimentary understanding of what they meant, and then tucked them away in their own personal dictionaries. The problem is, knowing what a word means but not knowing what it means in all of its contexts is not understanding.

As a teacher, I did indeed gain a lot from this article. I found the possible solutions to be realistic, viable options for me to take in my future classroom if my own students carry their private misconceptions to school with them. I loved the discussion about the use of labs in a classroom to help combat those misconceptions because it allows students to self-discover these misconceptions, which ultimately aids in their understanding. I was always stubborn as a student - if I had a misconception about something, I didn't really believe it until I saw it. That is why I connected with the idea of labs to help correct misconceptions. It works for both the students who just need to hear the facts and for the students who need to see them first-hand.