I was very excited today to receive my issue of the International Planetarium Society’s Planetarian magazine and see the first of my new columns in print. I will be writing about astronomy misconceptions and how they challenge educators. I will be focussing on a different example each month, but this first column gave me the opportunity to give a general introduction to misconceptions. The idea for the column came from discussions during a meeting of the IPS Education Committee.
Danger! Misconception ahead.
Welcome to the Column
Education is a complicated business. Understanding and memory are constructed in the wet, squishy and mysterious structures of human brains. The process of learning is unique for each individual, and it is not possible to directly transfer information from one brain to another.
This column will focus on misconceptions in astronomy education. Misconceptions can be useful stepping stones, or major barriers to learning. They are easy to pick up from everyday language or simplified diagrams, but can be surprisingly difficult for people to move past.
A Private Universe
Everyday life bombards us with unscientific interpretations of the Universe. Young children have books where stars are pointy and the Moon only comes out at night. They watch cartoons where spacecraft whizz between closely-packed planets.
Once someone has constructed an incorrect model of the Universe in their mind, all new information will be interpreted with respect to this model. Rather than helping, new information will be used where possible to elaborate and strengthen the incorrect model.
Like a walker who sets off along the wrong path, every new instruction takes them further from their goal. They listen carefully and do as told, turning left and taking the second right as instructed, without ever realising there is any problem.
The power of misconceptions is beautifully exposed in the excellent 20 minute film ‘A Private Universe’ (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, 1987). The film follows the thought processes of learners, revealing how misconceptions interfere with learning. It’s well worth a watch, and is especially recommended for training new educators.
Avoiding Conflict
Information that doesn’t fit within the expected model might excite a trained scientist, but for most people it will create negative, uncomfortable feelings. This is called cognitive dissonance. To avoid this feeling, people are likely to remove their attention from the conflicting information, and may even forget that they ever encountered it.
“The instruction says ‘turn left at the tree’ ... but maybe that was just when the road bent a bit back there? Or maybe it means the tiny track by the telephone pole? Yes, that must be it. Ok, let’s see what’s next …”
Your Brain: The Unreliable Witness
Even worse, our brains are perfectly happy to create false memories.
Scientific demonstrations with surprising outcomes are popular in informal education. But beware: learners have been caught in the act of rewriting their memory of a demonstration’s outcome to better fit with their prior beliefs.
This can happen due to use of inference to construct our understanding of what we are experiencing. Prior memories are used to interpret current events, and so misconceptions can distort the observer’s perception. For instance, an eye-witness report of a robbery is likely to be distorted toward the witness’s expectations of a stereotypical robbery (Holst, 1992).
“It looks strange but it must be down this way - it said to turn left by the telephone pole.”
I once heard a wonderful - if somewhat alarming - story about a demonstration where a ball rolls around a curved track which then releases it onto a flat surface. Students were asked to observe the ball’s path after its release. The ball travels in a straight line. But the students, laden with their misconceptions, report having seen it travel in a curve. The exasperated professor places a straight edge parallel to the ball’s path and re-runs the demonstration. The students cannot now deny that the ball is travelling straight … this time. They still insist that its path was curved the first time - they remember it clearly.
This all sounds rather disturbing, but it makes sense if you consider that human memory has developed not to create an accurate record of the past, but rather to provide information to help us predict the future. Even our most vivid memories are far less accurate than we might believe. But that’s another story.
Strategies for the Educator
Pathways of learning need to take into account that the learner is not an empty head. They may well bring an elaborated ‘folk wisdom’, common-sense or otherwise misconceived model that will need to be acknowledged before they are able to start building an alternative, scientific model.
Teaching can fail entirely where misconceptions are not identified and addressed. A good example of such a topic is Phases of the Moon. Learners often start with a well-developed (but incorrect) model where the Earth’s shadow is responsible for the effect. And many remain stuck with this model. This topic will be discussed in next edition’s column.
It appears to be necessary for such learners to pass through a period of uncomfortable cognitive dissonance and confusion before they will be able to accept that they need to reassess the accuracy of their prior model. So if your students report that your lessons are confusing and difficult to understand, this may be a good sign! (Dowd, 2012.)
Zombie Beliefs
One final note of caution.
When you have successfully persuaded somebody that their prior belief was incorrect, and they accept the correct scientific explanation, and they get 100% in the exam ... Stay alert. That incorrect model is still in there, lurking in their brain.
Despite having learned the ‘right’ answer, they may still instinctively fall back upon their prior beliefs in their future thinking.
A social psychology experiment (Anderson et al., 1980) demonstrated this danger. Subjects were asked to assess evidence suggesting that risk-taking personalities were particularly suited (or not) to being firefighters. Afterwards, they were told that the evidence was entirely made up (fake news!) and that the true relationship was unknown. However, when the subjects were then asked to explain their personal beliefs about such a relationship, they still called upon the debunked ‘evidence’ in forming their opinions.
Future columns
This column will look at some of the most common and important misconceptions in Astronomy. We will consider the misconceptions that the audience are most likely to bring with them into the dome, and how we might best help learners work their way out of these intellectual dead-ends.
References
Anderson CA, Lepper MR, and Ross L; Perseverance of Social Theories: The Role of Explanation in the Persistence of Discredited Information; Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 1980, Vol. 39, No.6, 1037-1049.
Dowd J.; Interpreting Assessments of Student Learning in the Introductory Physics Classroom and Laboratory; Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University, 2012.
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, A Private Universe, 1987. https://www.learner.org/series/a-private-universe/
Holst VF, Pezdek K.; Scripts for typical crimes and their effects on memory for eyewitness testimony. Applied Cognitive Psychology 1992, 6, 573–587.
With thanks to Julia Plummer, Ken Brandt and Shannon Schmoll of the IPS Education Committee for comments.