Copyright 1979 National Science Teachers Association . All rights reserved. It's not always easy to break through children's preconceived notions about the way the world works. It will come as no surprise to teachers that children can express scientifically acceptable statements even while maintaining serious conceptual misunderstandings. Columbus' boat traveled around the world and finally returned home.
Misconceptions can arise, too, when two or more learned concepts get mixed up with one another.
Perhaps the most common kind of misunderstanding arises because of verbal confusion-for example when a child mistakes the literal or everyday meaning of a word for its scientific meaning. Lowe describes a second-grade girl who, after a unit on phases of the Moon, asked her teacher where the Moon went. We believe, as Nussbaum suggests, that what teachers dismiss as misconceptions are often the student's attempt to integrate new and old understandings. Though such statements obviously indicate that the child does not correctly understand a concept, they do represent the learner's effort to organize the world meaningfully. Another interesting example of verbal confusion arose in a class which was concluding a unit on states of matter.