What strategies are most effective for overcoming high school students’ physics and chemistry misconceptions? Are there pedagogies that are particularly helpful for improving physics and chemistry content knowledge for students historically underrepresented in science? This project aimed to find out. We first developed two multiple-choice assessment instruments with items representing each of the high school chemistry and physics NGSS Disciplinary Core Ideas with a range of difficulty, discrimination and misconception strength. Using pre-and post-test data collected from over 6,000 students in grades 9-12 chemistry and physics classes across the nation, we estimated the effect of each of 31 teaching pedagogies on students' gains in science content knowledge. Pedagogical practices that had positive effects for all students regardless of race or gender included small group discussions, hands on activities and making predictions. We also asked these students’ teachers to take the same test and to predict the most common wrong answer among their students for each question. We found that one of the strongest factors in improving student content knowledge was teacher knowledge both in subject matter and of student misconceptions. This was particularly evident for strong misconceptions, those that are most difficult for students to give up. As part of this project, the MOSART (Misconceptions-Oriented Standards-Based Assessment Resources for Teachers) Self-Service website has also been updated providing educators, science education researchers, and professional development providers with extensive, easy-to-use, and up-to-date resources with respect to K-12 student science misconceptions; and easy access to fifteen free assessment instruments. We hope you’ll explore these resources.
Research / Evaluation, Broadening Participation, Addressing NGSS
CFA Harvard & Smith
Discovery Research PreK-12 (DRK-12)
Related Content for Misconceptions: From Roadblocks to Stepping Stones
Discussion from the 2022 STEM For All Video Showcase (16 posts)
Susan Sunbury
Lead Presenter Education Researcher/Project Manager
May 9, 2022 | 07:01 p.m.
Welcome to MOSART HSPS: Misconceptions Oriented Standards-Based Assessment Resource for Teachers of High School Physical Sciences
We are in the final stretch of the project. In addition to disseminating our research findings, we have created new standards-based, high school physics and chemistry distractor-driven, multiple choice assessments. We have also redesigned the MOSART website (https://waps.cfa.harvard.edu/mosart/) to offer resources for educators, professional development providers and educational researchers. The site contains a free repository of assessments in all grade bands and in all science subject areas to test student knowledge of science content as well as videos highlighting student misconceptions. We hope you’ll check it out this week. If you are a science educator, we’d like to know how you might use the findings presented in this video as well as the website’s assessments and resources in your classroom.
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Found helpful:
Ateng' Ogwel
Barry Fishman
Facilitator Professor
May 10, 2022 | 11:28 a.m.
Great project and thank you for providing this new resource to science teachers! Have you had much uptake yet? You've done a great job (not surprising for this group!) of developing the measures and showing their relationship to learning. What have you observed about how different choices about how to use the information leads to different outcomes?
thank you for your note and kind words! We are still hearing form users about the different ways they have implemented the resource, but we have had well over 300 users of the test resource, including pre-service and in-service teachers, teacher leaders for PL, in-service educators for use with their students, methods professors for use with their preservice teacher candidates, and PD providers with their participants. It has been helpful in assessing the scope of content knowledge for each of their audiences, and has allowed review in order to provide remediation/further learning where needed.
Great project! I really appreciate that the test are available online for public use. As a high school teacher myself I am curious about how to increase my own KOSM. What might that look like? I assume it would include implementation of a MOSART test but what next?
thank you for viewing our video and for your questions. At the MOSART site, there is now a tab for Professional Development. Here you can take any of the tests and get results about your own KOSM and results from other teachers. From this you can identify any areas where you may want to read further about students' common misconceptions. You can also click on the Assessments tab and select any of the subject areas for a list of research-based student misconceptions at various grade levels. Selecting All Assessments will give you the complete subject matter list and grade levels to choose from.
Andresse St Rose
Facilitator Director of Educational Research and Evaluation
May 12, 2022 | 11:12 a.m.
Fascinating project! Your findings reinforce what we already know as a major tenet of teaching and learning, which is the importance of teachers knowing their students, which includes in this case teachers' knowledge of student scientific misconceptions.
I imagine there are a number of factors that feed or inform student misconceptions and I am wondering if that has changed over time --from the 80s to more recent student cohorts that have easier access to media, content and social media networks etc.?
Susan Sunbury
Lead Presenter Education Researcher/Project Manager
May 12, 2022 | 04:13 p.m.
Andresse,
Thanks for your comment. Yes, these findings also confirm what we’ve found in our previous studies (with middle school physical science and middle school and high school life science) that one of the strongest factors in improving student content knowledge is teacher knowledge of student misconceptions. We started looking at student misconceptions way back in 1987 with A Private Universe (https://www.learner.org/series/a-private-universe/). Interviewing was certainly the way to go back then to learn what students were thinking about specific concepts. Unfortunately our current process for developing assessments, while elaborate, doesn’t include interviewing students due to time and cost constraints. We instead rely on the literature, experts and educators for this information. I’m sure it would be fascinating and eye-opening to interview today’s internet-savvy students - maybe a new grant opportunity.
What a wonderful blast from the past. I began my work in STEM education at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics many years ago, and what I learned there about misconceptions has shaped my work ever since. It's wonderful to see just a bit of where research about misconceptions, especially the role of the educator in helping learners change their understandings, has gone since. Thank you for this important work.
Chen Chen
Co-Presenter Research Associate
May 12, 2022 | 07:57 p.m.
To add to Andresse and Susan's comments about today's tech-savvy students, our data showed that simulation tech tools may help students gain conceptual growth if and only if teachers ask students to make predictions.
Janet Coffey
Facilitator Program Director, Science Learning
May 13, 2022 | 11:42 p.m.
Thank you for this work -- and the video explaining it! Very interesting! Is KOSM an aspect of teacher pedagogical content knowledge (PCK)? How does this work intersect with the body of research and knowledge about what teachers need to know to be effective teachers? I look forward to following your research!
Thank you for your comment/question. What we have found over and over is that pre-service as well as in-service teachers have more success with students' learning when they not only have subject matter knowledge, but also when they have robust knowledge of their students' misconceptions and personal ideas. When they have an understanding of what their students are thinking and bring to the table, it provides a basis for unpacking incorrect ideas and re-forming/informing then with a more "correct" version of the science on which to build. I hope that addresses your comment.
Janet Coffey
Facilitator Program Director, Science Learning
May 15, 2022 | 02:05 p.m.
Thanks for your response - and had assumed as much.
Chen Chen
Co-Presenter Research Associate
May 15, 2022 | 10:25 p.m.
Hi Janet,
Knowledge of students' understanding is a component of PCK according to Magnusson et al. (1999) classic definition of PCK.
You can find our recent publication about this topic below. This article has the most up-to-date literature review and discussion about similar findings presented in this video.
Chen, C., Sonnert, G., Sadler, P. M., & Sunbury, S. (2020). The impact of high school life science teachers’ subject matter knowledge and knowledge of student misconceptions on students’ learning. CBE—Life Sciences Education, 19(1), ar9.
Hello all! As a follow on to this rich suite of assessments, designed to help get at students' misconceptions and to address the NGSS for middle school physical science, we are in the midst of another project for building a portfolio of multiple choice assessment questions, and we are looking for teachers with middle school physical science experience to participate! This is an opportunity to submit questions that you use with your students that you think are effective; or you can help us to revise questions that we have found to be problematic in terms of gender or racial/ethnic bias, too difficult, or have overall discrimination issues. We will "run" all questions through a robust statistical analysis and provide feedback on the item parameters we mentioned. We will provide free PL on assessment writing for M/C questions as well. If you or a colleague of yours would be interested in this opportunity, please contact us at ccrockett@cfa.harvard.edu. We are also happy to provide more info on this follow - on project to our initial MOSART free resources for educators of science! We welcome your interest!
Susan Sunbury
Education Researcher/Project Manager
Welcome to MOSART HSPS: Misconceptions Oriented Standards-Based Assessment Resource for Teachers of High School Physical Sciences
We are in the final stretch of the project. In addition to disseminating our research findings, we have created new standards-based, high school physics and chemistry distractor-driven, multiple choice assessments. We have also redesigned the MOSART website (https://waps.cfa.harvard.edu/mosart/) to offer resources for educators, professional development providers and educational researchers. The site contains a free repository of assessments in all grade bands and in all science subject areas to test student knowledge of science content as well as videos highlighting student misconceptions. We hope you’ll check it out this week. If you are a science educator, we’d like to know how you might use the findings presented in this video as well as the website’s assessments and resources in your classroom.
Ateng' Ogwel
Barry Fishman
Professor
Great project and thank you for providing this new resource to science teachers! Have you had much uptake yet? You've done a great job (not surprising for this group!) of developing the measures and showing their relationship to learning. What have you observed about how different choices about how to use the information leads to different outcomes?
Cynthia Crockett
Science Education Specialist, Education Researcher
Hi Barry,
thank you for your note and kind words! We are still hearing form users about the different ways they have implemented the resource, but we have had well over 300 users of the test resource, including pre-service and in-service teachers, teacher leaders for PL, in-service educators for use with their students, methods professors for use with their preservice teacher candidates, and PD providers with their participants. It has been helpful in assessing the scope of content knowledge for each of their audiences, and has allowed review in order to provide remediation/further learning where needed.
Cathryn Tuttle
Great project! I really appreciate that the test are available online for public use. As a high school teacher myself I am curious about how to increase my own KOSM. What might that look like? I assume it would include implementation of a MOSART test but what next?
Cynthia Crockett
Science Education Specialist, Education Researcher
Hi Cathryn,
thank you for viewing our video and for your questions. At the MOSART site, there is now a tab for Professional Development. Here you can take any of the tests and get results about your own KOSM and results from other teachers. From this you can identify any areas where you may want to read further about students' common misconceptions. You can also click on the Assessments tab and select any of the subject areas for a list of research-based student misconceptions at various grade levels. Selecting All Assessments will give you the complete subject matter list and grade levels to choose from.
Andresse St Rose
Director of Educational Research and Evaluation
Fascinating project! Your findings reinforce what we already know as a major tenet of teaching and learning, which is the importance of teachers knowing their students, which includes in this case teachers' knowledge of student scientific misconceptions.
I imagine there are a number of factors that feed or inform student misconceptions and I am wondering if that has changed over time --from the 80s to more recent student cohorts that have easier access to media, content and social media networks etc.?
Susan Sunbury
Education Researcher/Project Manager
Andresse,
Thanks for your comment. Yes, these findings also confirm what we’ve found in our previous studies (with middle school physical science and middle school and high school life science) that one of the strongest factors in improving student content knowledge is teacher knowledge of student misconceptions. We started looking at student misconceptions way back in 1987 with A Private Universe (https://www.learner.org/series/a-private-universe/). Interviewing was certainly the way to go back then to learn what students were thinking about specific concepts. Unfortunately our current process for developing assessments, while elaborate, doesn’t include interviewing students due to time and cost constraints. We instead rely on the literature, experts and educators for this information. I’m sure it would be fascinating and eye-opening to interview today’s internet-savvy students - maybe a new grant opportunity.
Teon Edwards
What a wonderful blast from the past. I began my work in STEM education at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics many years ago, and what I learned there about misconceptions has shaped my work ever since. It's wonderful to see just a bit of where research about misconceptions, especially the role of the educator in helping learners change their understandings, has gone since. Thank you for this important work.
Chen Chen
Research Associate
To add to Andresse and Susan's comments about today's tech-savvy students, our data showed that simulation tech tools may help students gain conceptual growth if and only if teachers ask students to make predictions.
Janet Coffey
Program Director, Science Learning
Thank you for this work -- and the video explaining it! Very interesting! Is KOSM an aspect of teacher pedagogical content knowledge (PCK)? How does this work intersect with the body of research and knowledge about what teachers need to know to be effective teachers? I look forward to following your research!
Cynthia Crockett
Science Education Specialist, Education Researcher
Hi Janet,
Thank you for your comment/question. What we have found over and over is that pre-service as well as in-service teachers have more success with students' learning when they not only have subject matter knowledge, but also when they have robust knowledge of their students' misconceptions and personal ideas. When they have an understanding of what their students are thinking and bring to the table, it provides a basis for unpacking incorrect ideas and re-forming/informing then with a more "correct" version of the science on which to build. I hope that addresses your comment.
Janet Coffey
Program Director, Science Learning
Thanks for your response - and had assumed as much.
Chen Chen
Research Associate
Hi Janet,
Knowledge of students' understanding is a component of PCK according to Magnusson et al. (1999) classic definition of PCK.
You can find our recent publication about this topic below. This article has the most up-to-date literature review and discussion about similar findings presented in this video.
https://www.lifescied.org/doi/pdf/10.1187/cbe.1...
Chen, C., Sonnert, G., Sadler, P. M., & Sunbury, S. (2020). The impact of high school life science teachers’ subject matter knowledge and knowledge of student misconceptions on students’ learning. CBE—Life Sciences Education, 19(1), ar9.
Cheryl Craig
What a great title under whose umbrella your presentation unfurled!
Susan Sunbury
Education Researcher/Project Manager
Thanks Cheryl - we have Chen to thank for this title!
Cynthia Crockett
Science Education Specialist, Education Researcher
Hello all! As a follow on to this rich suite of assessments, designed to help get at students' misconceptions and to address the NGSS for middle school physical science, we are in the midst of another project for building a portfolio of multiple choice assessment questions, and we are looking for teachers with middle school physical science experience to participate! This is an opportunity to submit questions that you use with your students that you think are effective; or you can help us to revise questions that we have found to be problematic in terms of gender or racial/ethnic bias, too difficult, or have overall discrimination issues. We will "run" all questions through a robust statistical analysis and provide feedback on the item parameters we mentioned. We will provide free PL on assessment writing for M/C questions as well. If you or a colleague of yours would be interested in this opportunity, please contact us at ccrockett@cfa.harvard.edu. We are also happy to provide more info on this follow - on project to our initial MOSART free resources for educators of science! We welcome your interest!
Further posting is closed as the event has ended.