The past couple of weeks, I have been researching information on student misconceptions in science. Some of the information I found included common misconceptions held by students, how to discover them, and strategies that teachers can use to help students overcome their misconceptions.
This week, my focus was on teacher misconceptions in science. There have been several studies done to show that teachers themselves hold a number of misconceptions. For example, one study (Science Misconceptions Research and Some Implications for the Teaching of Science to Elementary School Students) was based on giving educators a survey of science questions. The researchers found that over fifty percent of the teachers answered about half of the questions incorrectly. This was due to a variety of factors; two of these are the lack of content knowledge and indications of serious misconceptions.
Teachers possess various misconceptions for many of the same reasons that students do. These include personal learning experiences and the context that vocabulary is learned/used in. Misconceptions often form when an individual first learns about a concept. Since they were never corrected or challenged when the teacher was in school or even when preparing lessons, the misconceptions tend to stick around. R. Bell, a science professor at the University of Virginia's Curry School of Education, also believes that "teachers themselves hold a number of misconceptions about the scientific enterprise... much of which they picked up in their science coursework" (U.Va. Teacher Institute Clarifies Misconceptions About Science). This goes to show that misconceptions can be introduced to adults as well, not just children.
It is vitally important that teachers discover and overcome their misconceptions before they even teach that concept. If the teacher has not confronted his/her own misconceptions, they risk the chance of passing incorrect information on to their students. This also makes it extremely difficult for teachers to properly assess what the students are learning. The most prevalent way a teacher can determine whether he/she has a misconception would be to do research on the specific topic. They can also find websites online that have surveys on particular aspects of science. The results of the surveys show teachers what misconceptions, or preconceptions, they might have along with information they may need to learn more about before teaching. This website has a couple of different examples of surveys that teachers can use.
Resources used:
http://www.virginia.edu/uvatoday/newsRelease.php?id=12414
http://www.utm.utoronto.ca/~astro/intro.htm
http://www.ericdigests.org/pre-925/science.htm
I had no idea there were websites out there like these survey ones for teachers to see what misconceptions they have. I think it is important for teachers to discover what misconceptions they have about any topic before planning a unit on it. I agree with you that if you don't know what your own misconceptions are about a topic, you could easily be teaching false information to your students, and the cycle of miconception would just keep growing. This reminds me of your other post about how once you put something in a childs head, it is hard to get it out. So, it would be better to teach the the correct way first, rather than to teach them a misconception, and then later try to get that idea out of their head to teach them the real facts.
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