Abstract
DESCRIBING THE CHARACTERISTICS OF MISCONCEPTIONS IN SCIENCE TEACHING
Many teachers think of their students as tabula rasa and assume a role as a
teacher that is oriented to fill students’ empty minds. The problem with this approach is
that students’ minds are not empty vessels that can be simply filled but already contain
certain preconceptions and intuitions which pave the way to misconceptions. A
misconception can be defined as an individual’s understanding of a concept as
substantially different from the commonly accepted scientific meaning of it. For
students misconceptions are not different from other explanatory information and are
organized very much the same way, developed for most scientific phenomena, and as a
result are persistent to change. The reason is that misconceptions are developed by the
students as a result of their observations in a long period of time and are invaluable for
themselves. In case of not being able to overcome misconceptions the learning process
is negatively effected. In this paper we discuss and present the reasons for developing
misconceptions, their general characteristics and categories, and the ways of helping
students to prevent developing misconceptions.
Keywords
Concept, misconception, science teaching
