Research on Science Education

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Slide 20

Explaining misconceptions

Speaker's notes explaining graph:

This slide displays the results across three grades on 6 misconception problems. Children who received explanations were much more likely to abandon their misconceptions. Interestingly, students in the simple prediction and data reflection experiments not only made the wrong predictions, but they followed with inaccurate observations. Observation was a near perfect predictor of interpretation. In other words, if they predicted that the heavier object would fall faster, that's what they said they saw. In contrast, children in the explanation condition made much more accurate predictions, and then reported that they observed what they thought would happen.

Chinn, C. A., & Malhotra, B. (2002) Children's responses to anomalous scientific data: how is conceptual change impeded. Journal of Educational Psychology, 94(2), 327-343.