RECOGNIZING EARTH SCIENCE MISCONCEPTIONS AND RECONSTRUCTING KNOWLEDGE THROUGH CONCEPTUAL-CHANGE-TEACHING

The Geoscience Education community has long been aware that many students hold conceptual understandings that are not aligned with correct scientific ideas, called misconceptions. The September 2005, Journal of Geoscience Education devoted an entire journal to this problem and placed a call for expanding research into Geoscience students’ “conceptions, cognition, and change.” Research has demonstrated that many students have difficulty changing their misconceptions, even when presented with valid scientific evidence.

This case study was designed to test a method to advance in-service teachers’ ability to recognize and correct their own and their students’ Earth Science misconceptions. The goals of this study were to:

• establish a list of common Earth Science misconceptions organized by the Earth Science Literacy Principles (ESLP),
• analyze the effectiveness of this method for increasing teacher awareness of their own Earth Science misconceptions,
• determine the impact using Conceptual-Change –Teaching process has had on classroom practice.

Each day of the study, teachers were introduced to a “Big Idea” from the ESLP, and they were provided an assignment worksheet which included a list of 5 misconceptions related to the “Big Idea”. Each teacher selected one misconception from the list of 5 and wrote responses to four prompts on the assignment worksheet. The prompts presented to the teachers were based on components from Mestre’s Cognitive Aspects of Learning and Teaching Science (1992), referred to as Conceptual-Change-Teaching. These components are research-based guidelines for teachers to use with their students. Teachers applied the Conceptual-Change –Teaching process in their daily assignments by designing student experiences based on the process. This study was conducted with twenty-three in-service teachers attending a two week summer field course.

As a result of this study, a list of Earth Science misconceptions, organized by ESLPs has been compiled and is available on the project website along with the Conceptual-Change –Teaching lessons that were developed by the teachers. Data will continue to be collected throughout this school year to determine the effectiveness of this method of correcting teacher misconceptions and to what extent the teachers employ this process in their classroom.