Eaton, J.F., Anderson, C.W., and Smith, E.L. (1984)
Students’ misconceptions interfere with science learning:
Case staties of fifth-grade students.
Elem. Sch. J., 84: 365-379.
冒頭より
【英語４】 次の英文を読み、以下の問い(1)〜(3)に答えよ。
(1)下線部1をその日本語文だけ読んでも意味が通じるように訳せ。
(2)下線部2「misconceptions」の実例を一つ考え、そう考える理由とともに記せ。
(3)この英文の筆者らが下線部3のように望むのはなぜか。
Assumptions, even assumptions that seem logical and reasonable, can make it difficult or impossible for people to understand scientific concepts. Everyone makes assumptions about the way the world works, assumptions like “When the sky is cloudy and dark, it will probably rain” or “Bits of wood float in water.” People often use those assumptions to explain how things work: “I can see myself in a mirror because light bounces off me to the mirror and off the mirror to my eyes.” Such explanations or conceptions are often based on experience and common sense; however, experience and common sense can sometimes lead to inaccurate or incomplete conceptions that can prevent a student from learning. 1
Since the early work of Piaget (1929 / 1969), researchers have been aware that children’s conceptions about the world are sometimes quite different from scientific conceptions. It is only in the last decade, however, that sustained investigations of how children understand school subjects have been conducted. In reading, for example, Anderson, Reynolds, Schallert, and Goetz (1977) and Smith (1975) have demonstrated that students use their knowledge of the world to comprehend written text and that students’ comprehension failures often result from misconceptions 2 or inadequacies in their background knowledge. Davis (1981) and Erlwanger (1975) have shown that students who lack mathematical knowledge and understanding often develop ways of solving mathematics problems that sometimes produce correct answers, but are fundamentally wrong because they are based on a misconception of how mathematics works.
In science, too, researchers have found that misconceptions affect the way children understand a variety of scientific ideas. For example, Nussbaum and Novak (1976) found that, although most second graders know that the earth is round, some of them think of the earth as a planet off somewhere in the sky, not the planet they live on. Other children believe that the earth is round and flat like a pancake or that we are on the top of a spherical earth and that people on the bottom are likely to fall off.
The purpose of the study reported here is to examine in detail the relationship between some fifth graders’ misconceptions about light, the science textbook the students used, their classroom instruction, and what they learned to construct what Erickson (1980) calls “stories of cognitive learning” of six students as they attempt to make sense of their textbook and classroom instruction on light and seeing.
We hope this paper will stimulate not only teachers of science but teachers of all school subjects to develop strategies for identifying and eradicating misconceptions that interfere with their students’ learning. We also hope it will encourage curriculum developers and researchers to give teachers’ more help in their efforts to do so. 3