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Travis Fuchs (@TTHFuchs) and I have spent a sizeable chunk of time through the winter months looking at “Misconceptions” in biology. We have recently submitted an application to STAO (Science Teachers Association of Ontario) to provide a poster presentation at the 2016 fall conference. We are also planning to publish a paper in an educational journal once we have it better fleshed out. Here is the preliminary summary of what we have done and what we have found so far. We are still iterating this project. In a nutshell, we have taken 20 years of the National Biology Competition test items and compared it to summary data published each year by Corey Goldman, the Competition Coordinator at U of T, regarding the efficacy of the test. The study involves over 104,000 students. We categorized and scored 1,082 multiple choice items using criteria established by Philip Sadler et al (2013) in his paper “The Influence of Teachers’ Knowledge on Student Learning in Middle School Physical Science Classrooms“. We found 115 new misconception questions. This is actually quite a big deal (difficult to find these types of questions) as we consider the impact that teaching has on student understanding through a variety of topics in Biology.
It is always important to place the credit where it is due, and Travis is really the brains behind this study. Some of his research efforts while at Harvard centered around the topic of “Misconceptions in Science” and it was by a fortuitous stroke of luck that we utilized the National Biology Competition dataset that I had been collecting throughout my teaching career. I have learned so much by doing this project with him.
@iamritapak Check this post out!
@marsenault is a teacher at LCS doing some really innovative think in the BIO space. A great person to connect with.
Mike – @iamritapak is our Bio teacher at York.
Travis Fuchs is the lead on this project and the brains behind introducing me to the misconception literature. I want to make sure that he receives proper credit for driving this project forward. He deserves the lion’s share of the credit, I had a hand in the coding and brute force organizing of the dataset that we are using. I am learning much from this collaboration.
When I read this part of your blog the other day, I was so wowed! I mean you and Travis are doing some amazing things and there’s nothing mentioned around the school, I’m sharing this to #LCSLearns now that you’ve published!
@jmedved mentioned @iamritapak, who was in my cohort and she was looking at personalized learning in the IB Bio course – she had some amazing ideas and I think she’d be an excellent person to connect with as well.
You’re an onion, and after 6 years I feel like I haven’t even got past the skin. You inspire me!