Uphill Water Flow - An Example of the Crucial Role of Students' Prior Knowledge in Geoscience Education
Abstract
One of the most important, but often underappreciated, challenges in geoscience education is posed by student misconceptions. Instructors of large geoscience undergraduate class seldom have the time to identify student misconceptions and are often forced to assume a certain base level of student knowledge upon which the course material is built. Empirical results from the past two decades of misconception research in mathematics and physics, however, reveal just how risky this assumption can be. Students' prior knowledge and misconceptions can greatly hinder their acquisition of new expertise and often result in short term rather than long term retention of course concepts. Successful transformation of student misconceptions has been achieved by coupling constructive learning with specific challenges to common misconceptions, but this approach necessitates knowing what those misconceptions are. At present, much more research is needed to identify the misconceptions and prior knowledge students bring to geoscience classes. As an example, the idea that water flows downhill is one of the simplest concepts we have in earth science. A logical, familiar and easily demonstrated concept, it seems a safe assumption that students already know, or will readily accept, that water flows downhill. Yet a recent study of students' map interpretation revealed a remarkable suite of often deeply-held misconception regarding surface water flow. Although the study's original goal was to measure the relative effectiveness of anaglyph and traditional topographic contour maps in conveying the geometry of the land surface, post-study interviews of participating students discovered many misconceptions about surface water flow and factors such as elevation, earth rotation, distance to a large water body, and compass directions. Of fifty-three students interviewed, only six students confidently expressed the idea that water flow is primarily controlled by changes in elevation. Many erroneous responses arose, such as equating `south' with `into the earth', asserting a hemispherical dependence of water flow on earth, equating water flow on familiar spherical objects with water flow on the Earth's surface, an inability to explain east-west river flow, and errors in predicting changes in river flow direction due to hypothetical changes in the Earth's rotation. In addition, our interview results suggest a large percentage of students have problems with small to large scale transfer and that students' confusion regarding water flow exists on multiple conceptual layers. Some of these ideas were so deeply held that students, even when confronted, were willing to believe that water would flow uphill to match their understanding of how it should behave. While it is still unclear how these basic misconceptions impair students' ability to grasp other concepts in an introductory geology course, our interview results serve to demonstrate that assuming students and instructors share common base level knowledge is surprisingly risky.
- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2006
- Bibcode:
- 2006AGUFMED53A0847C
- Keywords:
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- 0810 Post-secondary education;
- 0820 Curriculum and laboratory design;
- 0825 Teaching methods;
- 0840 Evaluation and assessment;
- 0850 Geoscience education research