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ABOUT MISCONCEPTIONS – © SETAC 1

About misconceptions

Etienne Bolmont

© SETAC - Do not cite without author’s permission Introduction The learning of science by children is often thought to need opposite methods. A method linked to behaviorism and is frequently qualified as ‘traditional’: when knowledge is transmitted by the one who knows, that is, the teacher, to the one who does not, the pupil. This method is sometimes necessary to teach facts that have to be admitted, as for example the series of numbers. A different approach to learning science emerged in the second part of the last century, linked to the research of Piaget and qualified as constructivist. This approach argues, in brief, that children build their own knowledge from elements that question both their own point of view and the one based on external influences. "All learning involves the interpretation of phenomena, situations and events including classroom instruction through the perspective of the learner's existing knowledge." If Piaget only took into account the interaction between the learner and the empirical world with which the child is engaged - the world of objects or the natural world - we cannot ignore the relations developed between the leaner and her social environment. This is what Vygotskij argued in his socio-constructivist approach, according to which language is an essential mediator in thought development. In this context, we can consider that the child learns by confrontation between his own ideas and those of his peers or of the teacher. The teacher may play a role in the both approaches; according to the circumstances, her choice may be to pass on knowledge, and/or to make the pupils acquire it on their own. Each time this possibility occurs, we have to start from the pupil's knowledge, which is on two levels:

• Knowledge acquired previously from formal education, mastered hence operational.

• Conceptions built on personal interpretation of a question, conceptions more or less solid, hence more or less difficult to question.


Conceptions or misconceptions? The English term misconceptions implies an a priori idea that conceptions expressed by pupils, giving their point of view on a problem, should be sorted into two categories: true or false. If the teacher considers conceptions as errors preventing learning, she is in conflict with the idea of constructivism. The value judgment is therefore made from the teacher's own knowledge or from the expression of knowledge defined in the curriculum. As far as the child is concerned, there is no error notion when he expresses a conception of hers, rather it is expressed in confidence or at the very most with doubt, but always it is always consistent with his explanatory system of the world. The pedagogical principle in this case is to let the child start from her own ideas, ending up on her own to questioning them, process which can occur: a) in a cognitive way, when the child perceives the contradiction with the external world (linked with observation, experience or a model); or b) in a socio-cognitive way, when she perceives the contradiction with ideas of other pupils, or with ideas defended by the teacher, or with information sources to which she has access. Therefore, the student is not considered as tabula rasa within a new learning situation. She possesses a certain body of knowledge that the teacher should know in order to ensure the optimal teaching approach. This approach will allow, on the one hand, to make the child conscious of her error and preparing her to correct or to question it, and also allow for detection tools that help the teacher understand what is an obstacle to learning. The following paragraphs analyse further the notions of conceptions and misconceptions of children in the education milieu. Whichever are the terms used in literature - preconceptions, alternative conceptions, naive beliefs, mental representations, alternative structures and naive theories - we will refer to them as conceptions. Their characteristics Even if pupils sometimes express them with a touch of doubt, conceptions are most often asserted and defended. They are based on observations that are linked to perception, through the senses, perception which offers evidence upon which the student may lean. This is one of the epistemological obstacles, called “first experience”, that Bachelard uses when he asserts that science is not built in the streets or in the fields. These conceptions resist to change; but the deployed pedagogy is not always sufficient to question them either by the supposed experimental evidence or observations, by the teacher's own ability to convince, or by the influence of the other pupils. They may coexist together with a correct approach of a problem. Pupils use on a pragmatic or opportunist way the answer 'conception' or the answer 'taught knowledge'. Constructivism shows that a conception may be questioned by a student through a complex process at two levels - knowledge and individual: firstly, the knowledge


system must be dismantled hence destabilize the student, then new knowledge may be restructured, therefore the learner is be re-stabilised. This is what Piaget called “increasing re-stabilization”. If the gap between the old and the new conception is too big (according to Vitgotsky’s zone of proximal development), it is possible that pupils do not get over it. In this case, we see either:

• Insufficiency or inadequacy of submitted explanations - therefore the pupil stays on his first idea, or

• Too strong a destabilization which is not accepted by the learner who will thus be led to refuse the expected change of conception.

Their origins and emergence Conceptions usually appear when pupils have a scientific problem to solve or a phenomenon to explain. They constitute a concrete solution to the asked question. Their origin is frequently based on an everyday experience of the physical world and they are built by analogy between a familiar situation and the problematic situation, as the following examples show:

How to explain the fact that in the summer temperatures are higher than in the winter? Everyday experience tells us that in order to warm up ourselves, we have to be closer to the radiator. We may conclude that the warm source, the sun, must be closer to the earth in summer than in the winter.

Conceptions may also come from information more or less under control:

If we refer to a shipwreck (such as the Titanic), pupils may get the idea that an object with a hole sinks when we put it in water. In electricity, current has the same value everywhere in a simple circuit (in series). A frequent conception of the students is that, on the contrary, the current is decreasing as it goes through receivers in the electrical circuit.

We can classify conceptions into three types:

• Descriptive conceptions: they are a descriptive answer without explanation, poor in the possibilities for exploitation.

• Operational conceptions: they refer to known situations. • Conceptual conceptions: there is a will of scientific explanation, they may show

a cause-to-effect relation, they need notions. With an adapted questionnaire, in oral or written form (texts and drawings), the teacher may make individual conceptions of pupils come up. These conceptions can be gathered in order to obtain some common conceptions in the classroom, conceptions that are repeated in every school year. Those expressed by only one child are not less important than the others in so far as they underline an aspect of the problem to solve.


Taking into account conceptions in science teaching A common practice of teachers is to make pupils' conceptions emerge but stop right there considering it enough. This practice cannot help science education since it is only a starting point of a research process. "Acquiring scientific knowledge corresponds to learning attitudes, methods and some main concepts. To access it, we need to go through a series of modifications, remodeling, breaks that cannot happen spontaneously, by a simple expression of the ideas of the learners, or even by a simple confrontation with reality." If we don't take conceptions into account, they persist in a latent state, ready to appear at the earliest opportunity. Knowledge given by the teacher is plated and soon forgotten, and often it does not allow solutions of new situations. Rather than ignore them, Giordan and De Vecchi prefer to deal with them in order to plot against them, which means confrontation, using them in order to transform them. We need to make the pupils aware of their own errors by giving them the necessary elements to make them able to rectify their initial conceptions. We could imagine an individual confrontation with an experimental element, leading to a meta-cognitive conflict, which is capable to question the child’s initial conception. This situation does not fit with the reality of the classroom and many authors consider that it is by language that the most effective questions can be conceived, and their resolution will allow to outclass conceptions. It is through socio-cognitive conflict that they will be phrased, sustained, abandoned or backed up. The scientific debate plays an essential role in this clarification phase. It makes the essential qualities of a scientific mind evident – these are critical mind and curiosity. Self-critique, critique of one’s own ideas, of the ideas of the others, curiosity about the others' ideas and curiosity in an active research process. All this necessitates argumentation about which the teacher must be careful. We share, in this analysis, the scheme proposed by SETAC within the pedagogical framework (www.museoscienza.org/setac/resources), although debate should not be the last thing to do. In particular, it cannot settle questions that appear in discussion. On the contrary, debate allows children to express questions more clearly, without eliminating problems a priori, therefore finding solutions in experiments, observations, inquiry, documents or museum. Only propositions contrary to logic may disappear. The others are going to coexist in the classroom, and 'misconceptions' will disappear only if they meet an obstacle, a difficulty. The obstacle is not created by the others' speech; it should also not be created by the teacher in an authority role, fact which would be in opposition with the method. They can be questioned only if they become hypotheses that investigation can confirm or infirm. This means that the role of the debate is to make students pass from the stage of certainty to the one of doubt, using hypothesis at the basis of scientific research. We can compare the way science is built in the scientific community and the way children are led to learn science. In particular, what corresponds to a conception for children is represented by the scientific model. We can also consider the notion of truth as adapted to the current model that is considered as valid on the one hand, and to


the conception considered by children as sufficient to answer to the posed problem, on the other. In both cases, truth is temporary, relative to the state of knowledge of the time for the scientist, relative to their own cognitive development for students:

Scientists Students

Start from a question to solve, which comes from an experiment, an observation.

Start from a question to solve, often laid down.

The problem has no a priori solution. The solution is known to the teacher and it corresponds to a didactic transposition.

Sum up the situation of knowledge acquired through a documentary research and stand in the frame of a theoretical model.

Search an a priori solution by mobilizing a conception.

Confront their ideas by spreading them, enter controversies.

Confront their ideas to those of their peers, which causes a debate.

Produce results to the retained questions through their experimental research or through a model. Failure is possible.

Produce results to the retained questions during the debate through investigation. Answers exist according to the artificial character of the situation.

And in the museum? Can we apply this learning approach to the museum? We know that people come to the museum with their own conceptions that may interfere with the intentions of the museum itself. So we feel the need to take on account these ideas in the way objects are presented or in the way educators conduct a visit. In the second case, we find something similar to the school, and educators have to be prepared to such a method. But it seems rather difficult to take into account people's ideas in the presentation of collections, when they are in "self-guided" mode. More research is needed for really identifying the main conceptions of visitors, taking into account their age, social origin, level of knowledge. As Henrikson and Jorde (2000) argue, "for museum professionals, knowledge of the audience conceptions on an issue (within an exhibition) should always be considered in the exhibition development process; it should be noted that the audience conceptions may prevent the intended interpretation of information presented at a museum". Researchers have carried out studies on this. Falk and Dierking (1992) noticed that visitors come to museums to learn about the strange and wonderful things displayed. To do this and to understand what they encounter, "they rely on their conceptual


framework – their knowledge and experience". Falk and Dierking distinguish occasional and frequent visitors, arguing that "frequent visitors have a frame of reference rather similar to that of the museum staff, while the occasional visitors can be very dissimilar". The authors underline the fact that "many exhibits are organized in a way that makes sense to a museum expert, but not necessarily to the general public". So, it can be difficult for the average visitor to understand the intended messages. According to Feher (1990), "people are explanatory creatures. They form theories, or mental models, to explain what they experience. These models are sometimes naive, often incorrect. “The point is not that some people have erroneous theories; it is that everyone forms theories to explain what they have observed” (Norman 1988). Museum visitors are a case in point. Norman analyzed the visitors' reactions according to these expressions, revealing the existence of conceptions from a Piagetian point of view:

"Interesting!" meaning for the visitor that although the effect is not in his previous experience, he could explain it. He has a mental model into which the experience could be assimilated. "Strange or weird!" meaning that this effect is contradicting his previous experience, his prior conceptions. "This exhibit displays a discrepant event. Ideally, by confronting the visitor with his preconceived or naive notions, a 'Weird!' exhibit opens the way for conceptual changes to occur."

As Sue Allen (2004) points out, "it is indeed possible to create exhibit environments where visitors are simultaneously in a constant state of free choice and in the process of learning some form of science". The museum offers to a diverse public the freedom to choose their own path, follow their personal interests, do their own inquiry, and create their own meanings but at the same time, it wants to be a place where science can be learnt. She emphasizes a model of inquiry cycle that could help to have such a consequence:

• presenting a surprising phenomenon • letting people explore it • giving an explanation • extending to connections to everyday experience.

This model built on hands-on manipulations has been embraced by many museums in a rupture to the transmission-based theory of learning "because it puts the visitor in a very active role as learner: experimenting, hypothesizing, interpreting, and drawing conclusions." If our goal is to make people acquire concepts and models of science, we have to create exhibits that succeed in communicating abstract concepts, themes and models of science. The first difficulty is to support a huge diversity of learners who drive their own learning. One solution, "multimodal", appeals to different learning styles and levels of knowledge. Roberts (1997) and Silverman (1995) argue that “narrative, and particularly narrative with multiple voices, should replace authoritative knowledge-dissemination as the iconic mode for museums to conduct their educational mission. However, narratives and personal stories have had a much less prominent role in science museums, where the dominant mode is still hands-on inquiry with a single-voiced authoritative explanation".


For Anderson and al. (2000), one solution is found school visits in "the importance of planning pre- and post-visit activities not only to support the development of scientific conceptions, but also to detect and respond to alternative conceptions that may be produced or strengthened during a visit to an informal learning center." Hohenstein and Tran (2007) suggest the use of questions in exhibits labels to generate explanatory conversation among science museum visitors. Perhaps as an ideal aim, Hein (1995) develops the concept of constructivist museum: "The viewer constructs personal knowledge from the exhibit and the process of gaining knowledge is itself a constructive act … Exhibits that allow visitors to draw their own conclusions about the meaning of the exhibition are based on this constructivist principle… Constructivist museum exhibits have no fixed entry and exit points, allow the visitor to make his or her own connections with the material and encourage diverse ways to learn" (see Figure 2 below). Can we imagine a new way of presenting things in a museum that focuses on the learner more than on the subject to be learned? SETAC develops examples of visitor use of conceptions in museum exhibits. It is impossible to design new exhibits based on these ideas in the time of the project, but the project looks into children’s experience of already existing exhibits.


Hein (1995) The Constructivist Museum


Some examples in primary school The following are examples from work with 10-11 year old pupils during SETAC presenting the use of conceptions in science teaching. 1. How does a submarine function? Here children have to imagine solutions to build a model of submarine that could work under water. They work in groups. Firstly, they draw a sketch of their proposal and secondly, they present their solution to the whole class, in a debate. The explanations they give show some conceptions about the materiality and the strength of air.

The children of the group give a descriptive conception of their model: "We inhale the air inside the can in order to make it sink, we let the air go inside to make the submarine go up". The debate makes appear two obstacles: one is linked to the consequence of making a vacuum in the can that should bend by crushing. The second obstacle is linked to the fact that people inside must breathe when the submarine is diving. 2. Digestion: what is the way taken by food in the human body? Confronting and comparing drawings lead to a debate that made the role of nutrition appear: "Why do we eat?". The pupil who depicted the digestive tract may have been misled by the French word "tube": he drew a continuous pipe, apparently impermeable (a descriptive conception too).

The straw is used to make air go inside and the paste is used to fill in the hole and to hold the straw


He recognized easily that there were at least organs to reduce the aliments mechanically.

3. How does the baby

eat? On this drawing the pupil linked mother's stomach and the body of the baby by a pipe (umbilical cord, word yet met and whose role in nutrition is acknowledged by the child). This is a

conceptual conception with the will to explain.

With this pupil we had to go back to the former chapter: digestion; where is food

going after passing through the stomach, what happens in the small intestine, etc. This

Before it is aflower, it's a seed.It is used to makehoney becausebees take thepollen


clarification allowed to remember the reduction of food into nutriments conveyed by blood and then to realize a drawing where exchanges between the mother's and the baby’s blood were shown. 4. What is a flower, where does it come from, what is it used for? Describe one. This drawing shows that the pupil knows some elements of vocabulary, correctly placed. Moreover stamens have been drawn without any caption. This is a proof that he tried to draw scientifically a flower which is not like the others. However, the notion of seed is not acquired and finalism is underlying (everything occurs in a precise goal: clouds move in the sky to bring the night). Indeed, for this child flowers have nothing to do with fruit and are only used to make honey. This is an operational conception, referring to a known situation. In the classroom, when the conceptions have been shared, questions appeared: "What is a fruit? What is a vegetable? Does a rosebush give fruits? Why does the flower wilt? What are the other insects doing when they come on the flower if they don't make honey?" A video allowed to answer these questions, and pupils built life cycles for some plants (apple and cherry). 6. How does a volcano erupt?

During the debate in small groups of pupils, some arguments have been advanced to decompose this conceptual conception:

• There may be eruptions under the sea where it is cold. • Volcanoes may erupt in the night. • We have seen that volcanoes don't exist everywhere on Earth, hence it

has nothing to do with the sun! If what you say is true, there should be many volcanoes in Africa.

I think that if the sun is too hot, the volcano will erupt.


• Heat comes from the center of Earth and lava becomes cold even when the sun is shining."

Examples in SETAC activities The themes studied in SETAC activities allowed conceptions to emerge. Energy, health and climate change may offer many problems to solve at the students’ level, and may then bring about various conceptions. The problems can be sorted into two categories in so far as they either lead to scientific questions - the solution of which pupils may find - or to questions not yet resolved by science - which might include social, economical or political aspects. The example of thermal insulation offers conceptions of the first category: In the class of Fabrice Charnot, with 10-11 year old children, two scientific questions have been solved by experiments: 1. The experimental process is given to the children: we use metal boxes of two sizes (tin cans of food) separated with different materials (here: nothing, cotton and polystyrene). Children have to guess how temperature will vary in each box, expressing some conceptual conceptions: here for example, cotton is warmer than polystyrene or cotton warms up the inner box more than polystyrene. To test these conceptions children only have to follow the variation of temperature inside the three boxes : the temperature stays the same in each box. So polystyrene or cotton don't warm up. It is the same with a pullover. Here we can ask: Why do we feel warmer with a woollen pullover? Starting from a different question, we get the same conception that it is the material that brings warmth, without any idea of thermal insulation. Now, we fill the inner boxes with hot water and ask: “What will happen to the temperature of this hot water in each box?”. Should we let the children answer before any measurement, they will have the choice between for example “the water in the box containing cotton will cool down less than the water in the box with polystyrene” and “the water will warm up more with polystyrene than with cotton”, they often answer at random. It is a justification to search an experimental answer.


After the measurements, we can see that the decrease of water temperature is lower in the case of polystyrene than in the case of cotton. Their interpretation generally is that polystyrene gives more warmth to the water than cotton, as they originally thought. Their first conception has not been modified. Here a debate seems necessary to recall and to use the result of the experiment where neither polystyrene or cotton warmed up inside the box. If we cannot invoke this fact in this case, we have to find another explanation. Then using the experiment with hot water, the good aspect is that polystyrene seems to prevent the cooling down of water more than cotton does, polystyrene is more efficient to prevent warmth from going outside. If they do not mention it, we then have to introduce the word insulation (or insulating). We could also propose a new situation with ice cubes inside the inner boxes. In which box do the ice cubes melt quicker? If they use the concept of cold, they can answer that the material insulating effect is to prevent more or less cold from going out of the boxes. Here is the old Aristotelian distinction between cold and warm, and it is a frequent conception for children. Let us try to speak only in terms of heat exchange; in this case the insulator prevents heat from entering the boxes. This interpretation of the phenomena is difficult to reach with young pupils. 2. About the role of air that explains the insulating effect of many materials, children make experiments with ice cubes surrounded or not with cotton. Cotton is compressed


or not compressed. The three ice cubes are put in the same place, at the same ambient temperature. Some children kept the conception that cotton gives heat, others who accepted the good conception hesitate between compressed cotton or not.

The first ice cube to melt is the one not surrounded with cotton. It confirms the former result. Then the one surrounded with compressed cotton melts and the last one to melt is the ice cube surrounded with airy cotton. Airy cotton is then the best insulator, which underlines the importance of the presence of air inside the material. A debate confirms the peculiar role of air in the composition of insulators (fur, polystyrene, wool, glass wool etc.). It shows that some pupils kept their first conceptions, saying that compressed cotton warms up less than airy cotton, while others think of a movement of air entering the cotton. In fact it is due to the insulator power of air imprisoned in the cotton. In these two experiments, we measure the difficulty to make the children change their mind. We are never sure that they accepted the new conception before we placed them in a different situation where they can use it, as we saw with ice cubes. A second example is given in the class of Bernard Pecqueux. In this primary school, pupils are 10 years old. Here we meet two different situations. 1. The first one is about explanations of climate change. Some children during a debate expressed the idea that climate change as being due to the ozone hole. The social origin of this conception is clear. But it is typically a conception that cannot be falsified with an explanation at the children’s level. The teacher may say that there is no link between the ozone hole and climate change, but cannot bring any evidence of it. The question cannot be solved, just evoked inside an opinion debate, not in a scientific debate. 2. The second situation is about the greenhouse effect. The explanation of the greenhouse effect is also difficult for children of the primary school, but building greenhouse models clears some conceptions about the role of the envelope. But these


models cannot be easily adapted to the Earth greenhouse effect. We can only make an analogy considering the correspondences between our models and reality. By doing this, we give them an operational conception. As a quick conclusion, we can see with these few examples the richness of the conceptions that children imagine or build. These interesting ideas need to be considered in order to teach science to our pupils. For this purpose, we have to allow children free expression that will show which ideas they have to make them question. Bibliography You will find an exhaustive bibliography on conceptions compiled by Reinders Duit at: http://www.ipn.uni-kiel.de/aktuell/stcse/stcse.html Adams Jennifer D. Tran Lynn U. & Gupta Preeti, Creedon-O’Hurley Helen (2008)

Sociocultural frameworks of conceptual change: implications for teaching and learning in museums. Cultural Studies of Science Education, vol. 3, 2. Springer.

Allen Sue (2004) Designs for Learning: Studying Science Museum Exhibits That Do More Than Entertain. Science Education, 88(supplement).

Anderson, D., Lucas, K. B. , Ginns, I. S. , Dierking, L. D. (2000) Development of knowledge about electricity and magnetism during a visit to a science museum and related post-visit activities. Science Education, 84(5), 658-679

Falk John (1999) Museums as Institutions for Personal Learning. Deadalus, Vol. 128, No. 3, America's Museums (Summer, 1999), pp. 259-275.

Falk John & Dierking Lynn (1992)The Museum Experience. Washington DC, Whalsback books.

Feher Elsa (1990) 'Interactive museum exhibits as tools for learning: explorations with light', International Journal of Science Education,12:1,35 — 49, 1990.

Giordan André (1983) Les représentations des élèves: Outils pour la pédagogie. Cahiers Pédagogiques, 214, 26-28.

Giordan André (1984) Learning process (and obstacles thereto) of science pupils aged 6-14. Council of Europe, Council for cultural co-operation, Educational research workshop on science in primary education. Edinburgh.

Giordan André (1985) Des représentations des élèves à l'appropriation de quelques concepts scientifiques. In A. Giordan (ed.) Reconstruire ses savoir (pp. 113-127). Paris, Messidor.


Giordan André & Gérard de Vecchi (1987) Les origines du savoir. Delachaux et Niestlé, Neufchâtel.

Giordan André & Gérard de Vecchi (2002) L'enseignement scientifique, Comment faire pour que "ça marche?". Delagrave Edition, Paris.

Hein George (1995) The Constructivist Museum. Journal for Education in Museums, 16, 21-23 (http://www.gem.org.uk/pubs/news/hein1995.html).

Henriksen, E. K., Jorde, D. (2001) High school students' understanding of radiation and the environment: Can museums play a role? Science Education, 85(2), 189-206.

Hohenstein, J., & Tran, L. (2007) Use of questions in exhibit labels to generate explanatory conversation among science museum visitors. International Journal of Science Education, 29(12), 1557-1580

John P. Smith, Andrea A. di Sessa & Jeremy Roschelle (1983) Misconceptions Reconceived: A Constructivist Analysis of Knowledge in Transition in The Journal of the Learning Sciences, 1993, 3(2), 115-163.

Piaget, Jean (1930)The childs conception of physical causality. London. Kegan Paul. Piaget, Jean (1971)The childs conception of the world. London. Routledge & Kegan

Paul. Roberts, L. (1997) From knowledge to narrative: Educators and the changing museum.

Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Rosalind Driver, Edith Guesne &Andrée Tiberghien (1985) (eds): Children's Ideas in

Science. Open University Press, Philadelphia. Silverman, L. H. (1995) Visitor meaning-making in museums for a new age. Curator,

38(3), 161 – 170.

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