The persistence of personal and social themes in context: Long‐ and short‐term studies of students' scientific ideas

Abstract

In this paper we will examine the persistence of "misconceptions." We used data from a longitudinal study of personal ideas in 24 students' thinking about ecological processes. The results show students often speaking about personal experiences dating from an early age, to which they had also referred in similar interviews conducted years before. These data are compared with results from a different study of middle school physics students' thinking about energy and steam engines. After the new learning had been "successfully" completed and assessed, old ideas returned. These findings are used to set up a theoretical basis for understanding the longitudinal results. Findings from memory studies are shown to explicate the long-term effects of the passage of time and prompts for the recall of scientific concepts. LONG-LIVED MISCONCEPTIONSIt has been very well known for at least two decades that students' mistaken ideas about scientific matters, or "misconceptions," do not easily go away (e.g., Champayne et al., 1980;Smith & Lott, 1983). In the face of this unanimity about their persistence it is perhaps surprising how little research has gone into exploring this obstinate continuity over time. The last two decades have witnessed an enormous amount of research which has tried to change these misconceptions in the minds of students, replacing them with new and more orthodox scientific explanations, far too many studies to detail here. Some of this research was purely theoretical (e.g., Hewson, 1981;Strike & Posner, 1982), much was practical and analytical (e.g., Andersson & Karquist, 1983;Shipstone, 1984) and some was practical classroom action research (e.g., Driver & Oldham, 1986) HELLDÉN AND SOLOMONthe students' understanding by showing them that the orthodox science explanations were more satisfactory, logical, and fruitful. The work in the final category, which was based on theoretical work from the first category, simply failed to produce the desired change (Johnston, 1990;Lijnse, 2000) even though the students clearly much enjoyed the experience. Their previous misconceptions changed no more than did those in a control group who had undergone no special conceptual change programme. Recently we have also seen research which described a large-scale science teacher education programme based on this same rather uncertain idea of conceptual change (Hewson et al., 1999). This unsubstantiated optimism about conceptual change is at least partially the result of a paucity of longitudinal research into the memory of early ideas over time.It is important to separate the notion of "constructivism" as a learning principle, from "conceptual change" as the desired outcome of a teaching and learning process. As explained some years ago (Solomon, 1994) constructivism can be used in several different ways in both philosophy and education. But its most valuable function for science education is to delineate a contrast between the old transmission view of teaching and learning, and active negotiation between students. ...

Still More “Fancy” and “Myth” than “Fact” in Students’ Conceptions of Evolution

“…If students do not recognize and reject their own scientific misconceptions in favor of scientifically accurate explanations, they will simply accommodate new knowledge obtained in the classroom within their existing framework rather than correcting their misconceptions. Even if students recognize their misconceptions during the semester, if they are not given the opportunity and motivation to reject or modify them, the students will usually revert to their misconceptions some time after completion of the science course (Greene 1990;Wandersee et al 1989;Hellden and Solomon 2004;Mintzes et al 2000).…”

A Conceptual Analysis of Evolutionary Theory for Teacher Education

“…Such predispositions might exist because they are useful or appropriate in everyday life-that is, in contexts other than thinking about biological evolution-and children have picked them up there (cf. Helldén and Solomon's (2004) suggestion that students' ''life-world knowledge'', which is continuously reinforced in daily conversation, cannot be eradicated by science teaching), or they might simply be innate (as Gelman (2003), for example, suggested for essentialist thinking).…”

The possible influence of curriculum statements and textbooks on misconceptions: The case of evolution

“…The first is that the misconceptions about evolution prevalent among scholars internationally at all educational levels, both before officially being taught the topic and often afterwards (for example, Bishop and Anderson 1990;Moore et al 2002) are also prevalent among South African pupils (Kagan and Sanders 2013;Lawrence 2015;Moore et al 2002;Mpeta 2013;Schroder 2012;Yalvac 2011). Having misconceptions is, in itself, problematic, but a more serious consequence is that erroneous ideas interfere with the success of further learning (Freyberg and Osborne 1985) and tend to be difficult to teach away (Helldén and Solomon 2004). The existence of misconceptions has serious consequences when evolution is meant to provide an underlying framework for explaining basic processes and phenomena in the biological sciences.…”