misconceptions

Misconceptions, alternative conceptions, alternative frameworks…

There has been a longstanding interest in children's ideas in science, since it was widely recognised that:

students often come to science classes already holding 'alternative' ideas about science topics
these ideas are often inconsistent with the science to be learnt
these ideas may be tenacious, and
these ideas are often still present (in original or modified form) after teaching

This wide recognition provided significant impetus to major research efforts to explore children's ideas in science. These efforts have identified a great many common alternative ideas that learners may hold - across age ranges and topics (see the Bibliography of Students' and Teachers' Conceptions and Science Education of Duit (previously Pfundt and Duit) available at http://www.ipn.uni-kiel.de/aktuell/stcse/stcse.html).

This research effort has been described as the constructivist programme (as it was based on the axiom that new learning is built upon existing conceptual resources) and was commonly known at one time as the alternative conceptions movement, as some children's ideas were labelled as 'alternative conceptions'. This was just one of the terms that has been used. Learners' ideas have been variously characterised as preconceptions, misconceptions, alternative conceptions, alternative [conceptual] frameworks, minitheories, intuitive theories etc. These terms are not always used synonymously: for some researchers certain terms have precise limited ranges of meaning. However, there is no clear consensus in the way these terms are used across studies by different authors.

The justification for studying learners' ideas so extensively was the view that as students' ideas constrained and channelled learning, so knowledge of students' ideas should inform teaching. It is recommended that teachers should identify their own students existing ideas by diagnostic assessment, and some 'constructivist' approaches recommend using students' existing ideas as an explicit starting point for developing new learning.

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Dr. Keith Taber teaches in the Faculty of Education at Cambridge, UK. He formerly taught science (especially chemistry and physics) at secondary and further education. He is a science education specialist, working with both science (and engineering) graduates preparing to be secondary school teachers, and with graduate research students at Master’s and Doctoral level exploring aspects of teaching and learning in science.