Misconceptions in Science
By BASIS Volunteer Riva Bruenn
We can all think of topics we learned in school that turned out to be simplifications of a more complex truth. Concepts like European exploration of the Americas or the law of supply and demand. The example that sticks in my mind is a plant reproduction lesson in middle school, in which we learned how flowers get pollinated. Not all plants make flowers however, so I left this lesson with a misconception about plant biology. These simplifications provide a basic foundation upon which more knowledge can be built, and most of the time students learn the broader, more detailed version later on in school. The subject areas not pursued however often leave students with a partial understanding of the truth, which may sway their opinions and perspectives. We cannot prevent some misconceptions and simplifications, but we can do our best to make students aware of the complexity outside the sphere of the class, and help them to understand how the knowledge in their textbooks is gained. In other words, we should give our students the desire and ability to seek a more detailed understanding of the concepts we introduce. As a BASIS member and a graduate student instructor, I am always seeking ways to simplify concepts such that a student leaving a lesson will carry away many new questions, as well as the ability to answer them on their own.
The BASIS lesson I designed with Kate Scheibel, Becky Mackelprang, and Carine Marshall and now teach with several additional members is about how plants are adapted to the climates they grow in. In designing this lesson we struggled with which concepts were most central and important to introduce, and which were unnecessary complications. We realized that the more we tried to convey, the more incompletely the students would grasp that concept at the end of our hour together. We decided to focus on one key concept; adaptation, and created a game in which teams must choose adaptations they think will help their plant survive in either the desert or the jungle. We begin by asking students to think of challenges the chosen climate presents for their plant, and then about how a plant might deal with those challenges. The teams choose adaptation cards, and we roll climate-specific dice to determine what challenge the plants must face. Challenges include “herbivore attack,” “dark and crowded,” and “sunny and dry” depending on the climate. Adaptation cards include “spines,” “grows tall to get to the sun,” and “succulent leaves to store water.” Each round of the game, students must trade an adaptation card that allows the plant to handle the challenge in return for a seed card, representing a point. At the end of the game, we switch the teams into the other climate. The students then see that the adaptations that made their plant successful in one climate are not effective in the other. Through this lesson, we hope the students will understand the basic concept of adaptation and how that concept relates to how living things look and behave in each climate. By focusing on one key concept, and relating that concept to familiar aspects of climates they have seen or learned about, we hope that students will continue to think about the adaptations of the plants and animals they see, and what sorts of climate challenges those adaptations address.
In order to understand the perspective of Science teachers who are in the classroom every day, and not just for an hour at a time, I spoke with Susan Deemer, a long time 7th and 8th grade Science and now Computer Science teacher at Katherine Delmar Burke School in San Francisco. Susan shared her strategy to cut back on misconceptions by helping her students to learn actively, rather than passively accepting and memorizing information. Her teaching philosophy seems well summed up with her statement “Science teachers reveal knowledge, we don’t really teach it.” She waits to introduce concepts until they can be discovered through active learning. For example, students can intuitively understand density by noticing that “how tightly matter is packed” is a feature they can use to differentiate between substances of the same volume. Susan uses real world experiences and familiar phenomena to help her students come to understand concepts on their own. Through a culture of active discovery, students see how scientific discoveries are made, and how these concepts apply to their daily lives. Students in a classroom like this are unlikely to grow up to passively accept knowledge. Not when they know how to dig deeper on their own to fully understand a concept that is just a flat formula in a textbook.
Susan says, “Our job is to help provide the evidence so students can identify the cause and effect relationships that are so critical to developing scientific literacy.” I believe that actively exploring a concept like adaptation through a climate-survival game, or density through hands-on exploration is the only way that these concepts can fully be understood, and thus not lead to misconceptions. Teaching our students how to figure things out themselves will give them tools valuable throughout their lives. Learning to ask questions and how to answer those questions is the essence not only of Science, but also all other subjects. By showing students how we know what we know, and why it is important, we will show them how to be life long students, and a life long student will not carry any misconception for long.