It’s another semester with a new group of students. This semester, I have a class of elementary education majors (using Physics and Everyday Thinking). In the course, students build basic physics ideas after collecting data from particular experiments. Overall, this is an awesome course. It seems that most of the students gain a greater understanding of the nature of science by the end of the course.
However, things don’t always start off with rainbows and unicorns. Many of the students come in with 2 big ideas that don’t really agree with the nature of learning. Oh, and it’s not just this course – I see the same thing other physics courses.
Common Student Idea 1: Confusion is Bad.
If I come into a class and I become confused, then something is wrong. It’s probably something wrong with me – maybe I’m stupid. It’s also possible that this is the instructor’s fault for not being clear enough.
I’ve written about this before, and it comes down to one line: Confusion is the sweat of learning. If a student doesn’t get confused at some point in a class then either the student already knew the material in class, or the student didn’t learn anything in class. It’s just like going to a gym to work out. If you didn’t sweat and you didn’t get sore afterwards, you probably didn’t do anything.
I hate to put the blame on others, but I don’t think this incorrect idea is the students’ fault. No, it is our fault (our collect fault as educators). Think of all the classes that portray confusion as the enemy of understanding. Actually, I just came up with another quote: confusion isn’t the enemy of understanding, they are allies.
In short, I think that classes that foster confusion should be the norm, not the exception. It’s clear that when students come into my physics class, confusion is not what they expect as a positive outcome.
Common Student Idea 2: The Instructor is the Source of Knowledge.
If you traced back the source of understanding, it would be like a river flowing from the mouth of the professor. This isn’t so crazy. The word professor comes from the word profess – to claim something. So, a professor proclaims the truth and students write it down. It’s that simple. Oh, the textbook is just like a professor. If it’s written in a textbook, it must be the truth.
The problem here is that students think that if I don’t tell them the answers, they can’t know the answers. If I don’t tell them the answers, I am holding back on the sharing of knowledge. This might be true for some cases. It is true for lower level understanding such as the names of different animals or body parts. It is sort of true for the dates of historical events (but not entirely true) and it could be true for other definitions. However, this is not true for most things in physics. Let me give an example.
What happens when there is a constant net force on an object? Does the student just have to take the word of the professor that the object’s velocity will change with a constant force? Absolutely not. There are countless experiments that a student could perform to determine this same idea (if you want a quick one, try this awesome simulator from PhET).
But wait! What if we (students) build an idea from evidence and it’s wrong? What if this is a test question and we get it wrong? The professor is clearly the authority of knowledge when it comes to grading a test. Well, that is a good point. But really, this goes to show that an instructor actually has two different jobs. Job one is to be a learning coach and assist in the learning process. Job two is to be an evaluator of understanding. Personally, I don’t mind evaluating students to help them improve their understanding but the whole grading thing can get in the way of learning.
What should we do to help students with these learning misconceptions? I think the best plan is to make sure that all of the classes (or at least most) include an element of confusion along with a dose knowledge building. Let’s not have anymore flash-card based courses.
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