Evaluating a Pedagogical Strategy to Address Misconceptions of Child Development

Students often enter courses with prior knowledge that includes misconceptions about human development and behavior. Generally, curriculum is constructed to present research-based information that may serve to ameliorate these misconceptions. However, these misconceptions persist, which may require more direct intervention. In this study, we investigated a pedagogical approach in which students directly read and write about common misconceptions to see if this approach addresses their misconceptions and changes their understanding. In total, 75 undergraduate (females = 64, males = 11) students participated in the study, with 34 students in the experimental group and 41 students in the control group. Using a repeated-measures ANOVA, there were few significant changes in the students’ ratings of the truthfulness of the misconceptions. Revisions to the pedagogical approach examined in this study are suggested to strengthen its effectiveness. Students often come into courses on Human Development and Family Studies with some “truths” or “beliefs” about human behavior and development. It has been argued that human beings have natural capacities for developing early understandings within core domains of knowledge (Keil, 2008), and from these core domains of knowledge they have developed “folk, naïve, lay, or commonsense theories” based on their everyday experiences and understandings (Wellman & Gelman, 1992, p. 338). One key aspect is folk psychology, which consists of predisposed understandings of self, other individuals, and social groups (Geary, 2008), which research suggests develops early in life (Miller & Aloise, 1989). These folk systems of knowledge can be fraught with misconceptions because they have “embodied biases and heuristics” that, on the one hand, allow humans to “easily process useful forms of information and act on that information,” but, on the other hand, can lead to the tendency to draw misleading conclusions that are based on intuitive understandings rather than careful study of scientific evidence (Keil, p. 197). Indeed, Swami, Steiger, Pietschnig, Nader, and Voracek (2012) found that belief in human-related myths was significantly associated with antiscientific attitudes. Kowalski and Taylor (2009) noted that many college students not only enter classrooms with a wide variety of misconceptions but also leave those classrooms with the same erroneous beliefs intact, as evidenced by the Introduction to Psychology students in their study. ______________________________________________________________________________ Direct correspondence to Dr. Robert S. Weisskirch at rweisskirch@csumb.edu Evaluating a Pedagogical Strategy 80 Family Science Review ©2011 by the Family Science Association, All rights reserved. In order to bring about the conceptual change necessary to overcome these misconceptions, one key strategy instructors use is the engagement of students in reading, lectures, and discussions to directly refute their misconceptions (Vaughan, 1977). To evoke conceptual change, some instructors may build curriculum to provide authoritative, evidencebased content, which may “correct” these perceived truths or beliefs. These perceived truths or beliefs may provide organic heuristics for understanding the world but may not be as functional in the face of academic tasks that focus on evidence-based argumentation rather than those that are experience-based or traditional beliefs. Geary (2008) argued that human beings have the ability to “inhibit folk systems and engage in controlled problem solving,” and an important role of educational institutions is to leverage these inhibition systems to override the intuitive folk systems that students have developed (p. 182). However, Keil (2008) counters this position, having argued that schooling is “surprisingly ineffective at overriding some of the outputs of folk systems” and suggested that a primary goal of education is to generate explanatory gists that are at just the right level of detail, [and achieving this goal requires] knowing what students know, knowing what they could know after a reasonable period of instruction, and knowing what kinds of new knowledge would do them the most good at expanding their understanding of the world, enabling them to make informed decisions and more effective actions in relevant contexts. (p. 198) Both Keil and Geary argued that students must have educational opportunities to examine the misconceptions that emerge from their folk understandings, and that either “controlled problem solving” (Geary) or “explanatory gists” (Keil) in educational contexts will allow students to incorporate newly learned evidence and information to correct their misconceptions. In this study, we examine the effectiveness of the pedagogical strategy of engaging students in the task of exploring their commonly held misconceptions (or myths) about human development by providing them with scientific evidence and explanations that question the beliefs that they hold as “truths” with the goal of revising and expanding their understanding of human development. Using misconceptions embedded in students’ intuitive understanding as a pedagogical tool is a strategic teaching approach supported by Vygotsky’s “zone of proximal development [ZPD]. ” This “social situation of development” through which a teacher can carefully construct a learning activity that leads to a “structural reorganization of a child’s [in this case, students’] psychological functions” thus advances the student’s own thinking and problem-solving processes to promote learning (Chaiklin, 2003, pp. 47-48). Keil (2008) argued that instructors should view folk understandings as assets rather than limitations, suggesting that “formal education often needs to build on intuitive knowledge systems rather than inhibit them [in order to] help students appreciate the limits of their understanding, [and] to outsource understanding to other minds” (p. 196). However, when misconceptions persist, they may inhibit learning. For example, Arntzen and his colleagues found that even with formal training, psychology undergraduate students, masters’ students, and even college professors held misconceptions about psychological concepts relevant to behavioral analysis (Arntzen, Lokke, Lokke, & Evaluating a Pedagogical Strategy 81 Family Science Review ©2011 by the Family Science Association, All rights reserved. Eilertsen, 2010). Misconceptions, therefore, can be resistant to change, even with the benefit of scientific knowledge. Retaining misconceptions may hamper students’ overall performance in a specific course (Kuhle, Barber, & Bristol, 2009), making addressing students’ misconceptions an important and necessary teaching goal for educators. Counterattitudinal advocacy is a pedagogical strategy for advancing student thinking that provides students with the opportunity to argue their own opinions (Miller, Wozniak, Rust, Miller, & Slezak, 2002), and thus may decrease the number of misconceptions held. Guzzetti (2000) supported the approach of offering students an opportunity to read refutational text that addresses a misconception and refutes the misconception with information supporting the truth. Using refutational text has been found to be more effective than just using a standard text that does not address the misconception (Hynd, Alvermann, & Qian, 1997). Refutational text may be more likely to induce cognitive dissonance in students by challenging their existing beliefs or knowledge with discrepant information and evidence. Through cognitive dissonance, students actively try to make sense out of what is puzzling them. Jonassen and Land (2000) argued that learning is a process of meaning making, and this process involves “dissonance between what we know and what we want or need to know,” thus pushing the learner to take ownership of his or her knowledge by actively constructing one’s own understanding to resolve the puzzlement and perturbation experienced by cognitive dissonance (p. vi). Kowalski and Taylor (2004) noted that the greatest change in misconceptions for introductory psychology students took place when instructors targeted the preconceived notions that were incorrect, and then provided counterevidence to support the correct information. In this study, instructors of an upper division human development course supplemented the course textbook with readings and written assignments using Mercer’s (2010) Child Development: Myths and Misunderstandings. By offering students opportunities to reflect on, and question, common misconceptions of human development (some of which may be their own), and structuring opportunities to learn about evidence from the field of family science that contradicts those misconceptions, we hypothesized that these students would be more likely to revise their understandings than students in other human development classes who did not directly address myths and misunderstandings using a refutational text (i.e., Mercer’s book).