The science misconceptions students bring to class
· 3 min read
Students don’t arrive in science class as blank slates. They bring ideas about force, motion, matter and living things, built from everyday experience, and some of those ideas conflict with the science they’re about to learn.
What the research found
- Commonsense beliefs about force and motion. Hestenes, Wells and Swackhamer reported that students’ commonsense beliefs about force and motion conflict with Newtonian ideas in most respects, and they developed an inventory for detecting those beliefs.
- Knowing the misconception matters. Sadler and colleagues found that, on questions with a popular wrong answer, middle school physical science students made larger gains when their teachers could identify that common misconception, not just the correct answer.
- How ideas change. Posner and colleagues’ model of conceptual change proposes that students give up an existing idea when they become dissatisfied with it and a new idea seems understandable, plausible and able to explain more.
These studies are about how students learn science, not about SubjectPath.
Why it matters for diagnosis
A wrong answer in science isn’t always a guess. It can be a consistent idea that makes sense to the student. A diagnostic that names that idea says more than one that only marks the answer wrong.
How SubjectPath will apply this idea
The Biology, Chemistry and Physics Paths are coming soon. They will be built on the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), with answer choices written to reveal the misconceptions students commonly hold, and practice that starts where understanding breaks down.
An everyday example
Many commonsense ideas about motion make sense from everyday experience outside the classroom. A moving object seems to need a push to keep moving, because things around us slow down and stop. Ideas like this conflict with Newton’s laws, and a student who holds one may still be able to recite the right formulas. Questions with answer choices built around those ideas can reveal what the student actually thinks, even when the student can also give the textbook definition.
Why naming the idea helps
A wrong answer traced to a specific idea gives instruction something concrete to address, rather than a topic to reteach from the start. It also separates a student who holds a consistent idea from one who made a one-off slip, and those call for different next steps.
Sources
- Hestenes, D., Wells, M., & Swackhamer, G. (1992). Force concept inventory. The Physics Teacher, 30(3), 141–158.
- Sadler, P. M., Sonnert, G., Coyle, H. P., Cook-Smith, N., & Miller, J. L. (2013). The influence of teachers’ knowledge on student learning in middle school physical science classrooms. American Educational Research Journal, 50(5), 1020–1049.
- Posner, G. J., Strike, K. A., Hewson, P. W., & Gertzog, W. A. (1982). Accommodation of a scientific conception: Toward a theory of conceptual change. Science Education, 66(2), 211–227.