Identifying and Responding to Student Misconceptions

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Identifying and Responding to Student
Misconceptions

• Center for Teaching Excellence
• 25 September 2008

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Starting Points

• Addressing perennial issue
• Student learning and prior knowledge
• Defining and identifying causes
• Disciplinary concepts, misconceptions
• Beginning to recognize misconceptions and
  teaching with (vs. against) them

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Definitions

• Persistent
• Widely shared
• More than incorrect
• Concepts, conceptions, preconceptions, naive
  conceptions

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• Concept is the scientific notion underlying a
  class of things or events, as currently intended
  by the community of scientists and documented by
  leading textbooks. A concept acquires its meaning
  through its network of relationships with other
  concepts.

Conception refers to an individuals
interpretation of the meaning of a concept. Such
an interpretation would usually have some
idiosyncratic features, even if the individual is
a scientist.
from Thijs and van den Berg (1993)
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Origins

• Everyday understanding
• Anthropocentrism
• Intuition
• Overgeneralization
• Faulty analogy
• and?

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Ways to identify

• Open-ended opportunities
• What does this remind you of?
• Paraphrasing
• Concept maps
• Drawing
• Word association, analogies

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Concept Inventories

• The Force Concept Inventory
• multiple-choice questions that pose relatively
  simple situations and ask students to make
  qualitative predictions about what will occur in
  these situations.
• The distracters (incorrect answers) are derived
  from free responses (written) from students or
  from interviews they represent prevalent
  misconceptions about the laws of motion
• Must know the misconceptions first

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• Difficult to create
• reliable instruments

Klymkowsky, M.W. K. Garvin-Doxas. 2008.
Recognizing Student Misconceptions through Ed's
Tool and the Biology Concept Inventory. PLoS
Biology, 6e3 (1-14).
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Concept Inventories

• Astronomy Diagnostic Test
• Hufnagel, B., Slater, T., Deming, G., J. Adams,
  Adrian, R.L., Brick, C., and M. Zeilik, M.
  Publications of the Astronomical Society of
  Australia, 17(2), 152 (2000).
• Biology Concept Inventory
• Garvin-Doxas, K. M.W. Klymkowsky. (2008). Life
  Science Education, in press.
• Chemistry Concept Inventory
• Jenkins, B.E., Birk, J.P., Bauer, R.C., Krause,
  S., and Pavelich, M.J. Symposium on Research in
  Chemistry Education," 227th National Meeting of
  the American Chemical Society
• Mulford, D. R., Robinson, W. R. (2002). An
  inventory for alternate conceptions among
  first-semester general chemistry students.
  Journal of Chemical Education, 79(6), 739-74
• Diffusion and Osmosis Diagnostic
• Odom, A. L., Barrow, L. H. (1995). Journal of
  Research in Science teaching, 32, 45-61.4.
• Force Concept Inventory
• Hestenes, D., Wells, M., Swackhamer, G.
  (1992). Force Concept Inventory. The Physics
  Teacher, 30(3), 141-158.
• Fluid Mechanics Concept Inventory
• Martin, J.K., Mitchell, J., and Newell, T.,
  (2003) Proceedings, Frontiers in Education
  Conference, Boulder, CO.
• Genetics Concept Inventory
• Elrod, S (2007) http//bioliteracy.net/Readings/pa
  persSubmittedPDF/Elrod.pdf
• Geoscience Concept Test
• Libarkin, J., and Anderson, S.W., (2003) EOS,
  Transactions of the American Geophysical Union,
  v. 84, Abstract ED22E-06).
• Host Pathogen Concept Inventory
• Smith, A.C., Marbach-Ad,G., Briken,V.,
  El-Sayed, N., Frauwirth, K., Fredericksen,B.,Hutch
  eson,S., Gao,L.Y., Joseph,S., Lee, V.,McIver,
  K.S.,Mosser, D., Quimby, B.B.,Shields, P., Song,
  W.,Yuan, R.T., and Stein, D.C., (2007) Second
  Conceptual Assessment in Biology (CAB II)
  Conference.

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Teaching to Misconceptions

• Create conflict between problem and misconception
• Models
• Students explain processes
• Telling is insufficient
• Cannot simply do away with misconceptions
• Integrate into new learning

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An example

• Course Introduction to the Novel
• Misconception All long books are novels
• Significance Genres demonstrate historically
  significant trends, tastes, and conditions.
  Misunderstanding the nature of a genre of long
  books indicates limited awareness of the novel
  as an artifact of those trends, tastes, and
  conditions.
• Strategy Students identify and describe multiple
  genres of long books.
• Purpose Recognition of these genres as related
  but distinct kinds of texts. Recognition of the
  specificity of the novel among other books.
  Beginning critical awareness on which to begin
  building understanding of the novel.

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In the Disciplines

• What are the big ideas?
• What are your perceived misconceptions?
• How might you identify them?
• How to teach with them?