Presentation by: Travis Fuchs
Session: E | Time: 11:05AM – 11:45AM | Location: Room 201
Students come to science classrooms with many ideas about how the world works. Of all the ideas, some do not match those of the scientific community and can lead to misunderstandings. These ideas go by many names in the research literature, but for this presentation we will call them misconceptions. Although misconceptions have been viewed as barriers to learning, we agree with contemporary education research and view misconceptions as resources for learning. Indeed, in our practice, we have found once misconceptions are known, they can be planned for and addressed. As such, we sought to compile a reference guide of misconceptions from secondary biology we could use to more effectively plan our lessons, units, and assessments.
We initially analyzed our students’ test-data to find misconceptions that could populate our reference guide. However, we decided to use a large sample size (111,238 students, 1,181 questions) over many years (1995-2017) to increase the power of our research. Using the University of Toronto’s National Biology Competition test-data, we identified 131 misconceptions. To do so, we sought the most common wrong answers given by students on a multiple-choice test. For the item to be labelled a misconception, greater than 50% of students had to choose the same wrong answer. We found that these items agreed with many aspects of the existing misconception literature, namely: ubiquity across subject areas, pervasiveness regardless of question difficulty, and distractive power. We also found that the misconceptions identified could be found in previous misconception studies.
We will present 21 of these misconceptions, and the questions they are based off, from subject areas General Biochemistry and Cell Structure and Processes. We will highlight how the misconceptions and questions could be used for lesson planning and for teacher professional development. We will also comment on the persistent misconceptions found throughout our 23-year sample and connect this to the recent coexistence of conceptions claim outlined by other misconception researchers.
Finally, we will reflect on the research process as a whole, discussing how the results have improved our practice well beyond the science classroom.
Abstract: 549