How a research-based conceptual questionnaire is helping reveal students’ prior conceptions before teachers start teaching them.

What if science teachers could easily and quickly find out what their students understand — or misunderstand — before they start teaching a topic?

Research has long told us that such prior knowledge can greatly improve science education, because lessons and discussions can be adjusted accordingly. But to efficiently ‘diagnose’ the various levels of understanding across a class of individual learners has proved challenging.

Dr Hye-Eun Chu, a lecturer at Macquarie University, has studied students’ alternative conceptions, otherwise known as misconceptions, and the factors that influence students’ conceptual development in science. She has realised that the findings of research studies into alternative conceptions in science education that have been reported over the past 30 years have not been applied in school classrooms. It is rare for science teachers to read such academic research papers on students’ conceptual difficulties when they prepare their lessons.

Because of this discovery, Dr Chu has developed a new tool that enables teachers to quickly identify students’ alternative conceptions otherwise known as misconceptions, which might derail their further learning —as well as create key gaps in their foundational knowledge and understanding.

Her two-tiered multiple-choice questionnaire can be closely mapped to the various stages of the science curriculum.  Through a carefully-designed structure based on studies available in the research literature, and by using tested questions —and familiar scenes connecting science to daily life — the tool reveals much more about an individual student than a conventional classroom assessment or test would.

‘Even though we know about the benefits of diagnosing students’ prior knowledge, this is rarely applied in the classroom,’ says Dr Chu.

‘Teachers do not have time to individually monitor students, especially quiet students — so they often overlook students’ conceptual difficulties.’

Unlike standard multiple-choice questionnaires, Dr Chu’s tool not only reveals what students know — or don’t know — but also why.

For example, asking a first-tier question about the relative temperatures of an icy pole and its wooden stick when it comes out of the freezer elicits some useful information about a student’s knowledge.

A student who correctly answers that both are at the same temperature might appear to understand thermal equilibrium. But by offering the respondent a second tier of credible-looking explanations for each possible first-tier answer, teachers get a much clearer picture.

A correct answer might not necessarily mean that a student understands an important scientific concept and can apply it to multiple scenarios. For example, a student with the correct answer for the icy pole scenario may then select ‘This is because they are cooled evenly’, indicating little understanding. This would alert the teacher to revisit or discuss the key concept at the core of the study unit; that is, that heat transfer occurs via conduction between two objects or systems at different temperatures until equilibrium is achieved.

Dr Chu conducted her initial research in Korea and Singapore with 2,000 students and their teachers. She is now preparing to design and test a similar two-tiered questionnaire to help teachers diagnose their classes for the additional HSC Physics topics introduced this year in NSW. She is also investigating links between students’ participation in class and their conceptual understanding, another potential alert for science educators.

‘This approach is proving very useful,’ says Dr Chu, ‘Teachers and researchers need a tool (or test) that is easy both to implement and mark, and that links science to everyday life, so that the importance and relevance of scientific concepts to our lives is clear.’

Recently Dr Chu has written an article for teachers on her two-tier diagnostic instrument and how to select appropriate conceptual questionnaires to diagnose students’ prior conceptions before teachers start teaching them. Below is the link to this article:

https://www.ase.org.uk/journals/school-science-review/2018/03/368/ (see article #107, p. 115)

Bio-note, Dr Hye-Eun Chu:

Dr Chu’s passion for science education derives from her own schooling and her good fortune in having had a talented and enthusiastic science teacher. When she later came to a career junction, facing a choice between pure physics and science education, she knew she wanted to help students understand and engage with science. Following a stint at Curtin University, Perth, and Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, in 2015 she took up a position as a Lecturer with Macquarie University’s Department of Educational Studies.