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Preconceptions in Education: Using the Know-It-All Effect to Our Advantage
An oft-heard lament among educators, and especially public educators, is of ignorance—their students’
ignorance. Teachers bemoan students who can’t spell, can’t add, can’t expound upon the simplest scientific fact.
Students seem to retain little if any of the material their teachers work so hard to impart upon them, and year after
year remain blissfully ignorant. However, according to new studies, the problem in education lies as much with
what students already know as with what they don’t.
“Preconceptions” is one of the new buzzwords in educational establishments across the country. The term
refers to what the student brings into the classroom; the ideas, intuitions, concepts, and beliefs each has constructed from his or her extra-curricular environment. Preconceptions are the sum of the worldview the student
has been crafting from day one. And “day one” is no hyperbole. Researchers are daily surprised at the attentions infants pay to their surroundings, and at the understanding they display of natural laws. The National
Research Council informs “An infant’s brain gives precedence to certain kinds of information: language, basic concepts of number, physical properties, and the movement of animate and inanimate objects.”1 Through a focus on
such topics, the infant constructs a system of beliefs about aspects and occurrences never explicitly explained
about the world around him. These preconceptions encompass everything from the laws of gravity to language
classification to object permanence.2 By mid-childhood, preconceptions dealing with almost any topic the student
may encounter in the classroom have been established.x-y?
By the time a child sets off for her first day of kindergarten, she takes with her a very stable set of laws
concerning how the world works. These preconceived laws are often incorrect, inexact and incomplete, and may
be illogical. But these laws provide explanations for the universe that “work” for the child. Surprisingly, the incorrect laws intuited by students are often alike. James Minstrell writes about the laws of motion: “Students come to
the classroom with initial conceptions organized by their experiences . . . There is remarkable consistency among
the naïve conceptions about motion that students in various cultures bring to the physics classroom.”3 Teachers find
that these naïve conceptions are often contrary to the truth. Children filling the rows of desks are not open-minded
students, eager to learn about the world around them, but instead students who subconsciously believe they
already know about the world around them. These studies have brought a completely new representation of the
student’s mind. “The learner’s mind is not a blank slate upon which new knowledge can be inscribed . . . .
Learners are not sponges ready to absorb the knowledge transmitted by the teacher in a ready-to-use form.”4
Moreover, the student’s mind-slate is not easily erased. Jonathan St. B. T. Evans expands: “Researchers in these
traditions are united in their rejection of the tabula rasa assumption that students enter institutions with no preconceptions about a topic before it is taught, and their belief that these naïve ideas cannot be easily ignored or
replaced through direct instruction or lecture.”5 Preconceptions strongly impact the learning process, and educators are learning to use this fact to their advantage.
Educators agree that preconceptions fostered by the student must be taken into account in the classroom.
Mestre writes “Knowledge previously constructed by the learner will affect how he or she interprets the knowledge
that the teacher is attempting to impart”6 When learning, students must integrate new information with ideas
they currently believe. Sometimes new information will replace old information. However, most often facts presented by the teachers are altered and forced to fit into the rubric already in place in the student’s mind. The
average eighth or ninth grader, encountering true physics laws for the first time, finds the teacher’s lessons in conflict with his or her beliefs. The laws the teacher presents are new, but the situations explained by the laws are
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familiar. “Many of the concepts presented in this area must displace or be remolded from stable intuitive concepts
that the student has constructed over a number of years” found John Clement in his study of mechanical preconceptions.7 Very often, the student’s explanations, familiar and self-logical, seem more plausible than what the teacher
presents. Mestre comments “The problem with these incorrect notions is that many of them are resistant to instruction. Students retain a considerable number of their erroneous beliefs following lessons in which lucid explanations are provided for the phenomena in question.”8 He goes on to say “Research findings consistently show that
misconceptions are deeply seated and are likely to remain after instruction, or even to resurface some weeks after
students have displayed some initial understanding immediately following instruction.”9 And so students loyally
cling to their old incorrect ideas instead of the new scientific ones.
This clinging is not willful. The human mind merely has a tendency to favor the status quo. The universal
human desire to be right apparently has biological roots: “Human beings have a fundamental tendency to seek
information consistent with their current beliefs, theories or hypotheses, and to avoid the collection of potentially falsifying evidence.”10 When a teacher presents a student with incontrovertible arguments negating their intuitive
beliefs, the student often ignores these facts. As Schauble states, “If prior beliefs are inconsistent with the evidence being generated, evidence may be overlooked or incorrectly interpreted.”11 In fact, children struggling
with certain basic ideas often have this phenomenon to blame. “Difficulties with conceptual primitives appear to
originate in intuitive preconceptions that the student develops on his own before entering the course.”12 Again, it
is not the student’s obstinacy that precludes learning, but instead a factor of the way the human brain is wired.
Mestre writes “If the process learned conflicts with knowledge already possessed by the individual, then the individual either will not be able to accommodate in memory the process learned in any meaningful sense, or will
construct parallel, constructing knowledge structures.”13 Often this prevents learning, and students emerge from the
classroom with their prior beliefs intact.
However, preconceptions bring opportunities along with challenges. If understood and dealt with correctly,
the students’ preconceptions can heighten their understanding of material. Clement advises teachers, “Increased
awareness of such preconceptions should allow the development of new instructional strategies that take student’s
beliefs into account and that foster a deeper level of understanding than is currently the norm.”14 This fact holds
true across all disciplines. “The more one knows about a subject, the easier it is to acquire knowledge about that
subject” is a fact readily accepted by educational experts.15 Numerous studies show the comparative ease with
which experts augment their substantial knowledge while novices struggle to recall the smallest facts.16 Therefore,
building on previous learning affords an advantage to starting from scratch. Students’ investments in their preconceptions benefit the correction of these incorrect ideas if proper care is taken.
Although preconceptions often deter learning, when properly dealt with the student’s intuitive beliefs can
enrich the educational process. However, this depends on the teacher. Minstrell put it this way: “The act of
instruction can be viewed as helping the students unravel individual strands of belief, label them, and then weave
them into a fabric of more complete understanding.”17 No longer is teaching simply imparting information for students to absorb. Instead, “teachers need to pay attention to the incomplete understandings, the false beliefs and
naïve renditions of concepts that learners bring with them to a given subject.”18 The first step in the process is for
teachers to identify the beliefs held by their students. Jere Confrey writes “Students enter instruction with firmly held
beliefs and explanations for phenomena and relationships, and these beliefs are subject matter-specific and can
be identified and conformed only through methods that encourage children to be expressive and predictive.”19
Using questions and other learner-centered activities at the onset of a lesson not only provides an avenue for teachers to discover their students’ preconceptions, but also heightens the students’ personal investment in a topic while
engaging their interest. Minstrell writes “We need a question or activity that is thought-provoking or will arouse the
learner’s curiosity. The use of pre-instruction questions, especially those that ask students to make a prediction that
can be readily tested, stimulates interest in subsequent related activities.”20 The teacher’s adeptness at discerning
these beliefs is pivotal to the educational success of the students’ success: “The depth of our understanding of the
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student’s knowledge state and or cleverness in engaging its subtleties may then determine the ultimate success or
failure of our teaching efforts.”21
Student’s preconceptions provide a natural structure for practical application of the information. In combating errant preconceptions, teachers should strive to make learning relevant by relating the concepts dealt with in
the classroom to situations in the students’ everyday lives. “We should not presume to devise artificial settings
that express our expert mathematical conceptions in transparent form,” writes Cobb, “Instead, we should attempt
to develop instructional situations in which the teacher can draw on students’ prior experiences to guide the negotiations of initial conventions of interpretations.”22 In this way, preconceptions formed outside the classroom span
the gap between classroom teaching and real life.
In her article concerning preconceptions, researcher Andrea DiSessa did an experiment using computer
software employing the “dynaturtle.” The subjects’ task is to guide the dynaturtle into a target. The dynaturtle can
only be controlled in two ways: it can be pointed and “kicked.” The angle of pointing is restricted to 15 degree
increments, and speed is restricted to two levels. DiSessa found almost every student made the same mistake in
reasoning. Student after student failed to take into account the existing speed of the dynaturtle in their steering
efforts. Students relied on their intuitive beliefs about momentum, despite physical evidence to the contrary. Their
preconceptions proved stronger than their observations. DiSessa relates her findings to the current debate about
preconceptions, likening the students’ prior beliefs to momentum. She writes of this experiment: “As with our naïve
subjects’ assumption about dynaturtle, most teaching seems to assume no dynamical state on the part of the students . . . ‘Pushing in the way you want to go’ seems to work pretty well, especially if one pushes hard enough.
But what this kind of work begins to reveal to us, as dynaturtle revealed the notion of momentum to our subjects, is
that there is a rich and complex knowledge state one can use to good advantage in attaining pedagogical
aims.”23 The students’ momentum is their natural link between scientific phenomena in the real world and their
internal explanations for these phenomena. This momentum needs to be harnessed and employed to accelerate
learning, and teachers are the ones to do the harnessing.
3
National Research Council, How People Learn (National Academy Press: Washington, 2000), 10. Many of
the ideas mentioned in this article spring from this source, and I encourage you to read the chapter on
Preconceptions there.
2 For a discussion of infant intuitions concerning language classification, see L. E. Bahrick and J. N. Pickens
“Classification of Bimodal English and Spanish Language Passages by Infants,” Infant Behavior and Development,
Volume 11 (1988), 277-296. R. Baillargeon does fascinating work on infant determination of basic physical
laws: the physics of support in his 1992 article and object permanence in his 1995 work. [Baillargeon, R.
“Physical Reasoning in Infancy.” The Cognitive Neurosciences, ed. M. S. Gassaniga. Cambridge: MIT,
1995.; Baillargeon, R., A. Needham and J. Devos. “The Development of Young Infants’ Intuitions about
Support.” Early Development Parenting, Vol. 1, 1992, 69-78.]
3 James Minstrell, “Teaching Science for Understanding,” Toward the Thinking Curriculum: Current Cognitive
Research, ed. Lauren B. Resnick and Kopfer, Leopold E. (Alexandria: Association for Supervision and Curriculum
Development, 1989), 130.
4 Jose P. Mester, “Cognitive Aspects of Learning and Teaching Science,” Teacher Enhancement for Elementary and
Secondary Science and Mathematics: Status, Issues, and Problems, eds. S. J. Fitzsimmons and L. C.
Kerpelman (Arlington: National Science Foundation, 1994), 3-8.
5 Jonathan St. B. T. Evans, Bias in Human Reasoning: Causes and Consequences (Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum,
1989), 5.
6 Mestre, 3-8.
7 John Clement, “Students’ Preconceptions in Introductory Mechanics,”
American Journal of Physics, Vol. 50
(1982), 70.
8 Mestre, 3-3.
9 Mestre, 3-11.
10 Evans, 41.
11 Leona Schauble, “Belief Revision in Children: The Role of Prior Knowledge and Strategies for Generating
Evidence,” Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, Vol. 49 (1990), 32.
12 Clement, 66.
13 Mestre, 3-7.
14 Clement, 70.
15 NRC, 10.
16 See A. M. Lesgold, “Acquiring Expertise,” Tutorials in Learning and Memory: Essays in Honor of Gordon
Bower, ed. J. R. Anderson and S. M. Kosslyn (Hillsdale: Erlbaum, 1984).
17 Minstrell, 130.
18 NRC, 10.
19 Jere Confrey, “A Review of Research on Student Conceptions in Mathematics, Science Programming,” Review
of Research in Education 16, Ed. C. B. Cadzen (Washington: American Educational Research Association,
1990), 4.
20 Minstrell, 145.
21 Minstrell, 65.
22 Paul Cobb et al, “A Constructionist Alternative to the Representational View of Mind in Education,” Journal for
Research in Mathematics Education, Vol. 23, No. 1 (1992), 13.
23 Andrea DiSessa, “Unlearning Aristotelian Physics: A Study of Knowledge-Based Learning,” Cognitive Science,
Vol. 6 (1982), 65.
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