NPR – Anya Kamenetz
“Sadler says that cognitive science tells us that if you don’t understand the flaws in students’ reasoning, you’re not going to be able to dislodge their misconceptions and replace them with the correct concepts. “It’s very expensive in terms of mental effort to change the ideas that you come up with yourself,” Sadler says. “It’s a big investment to say, ‘I’m going to abandon this thing that I came up with that makes sense to me and believe what the book or the teacher says instead.’ ” In one study, which he recently wrote about in American Educator magazine, Sadler gave 20 multiple-choice science questions to a group of middle school students. For each test item, one of the “distractors” was a very common misconception. In fact, often the misconception was far more popular than the right answer.”(more)