Student misconceptions can be read as knowledge elements that serve in some contexts and are refined and reorganised during learning, rather than as strongly held flawed ideas that instruction must confront and replace¶

Claim · All claims
Evidence · 1 study · theoretical r2 · q1 · n=not applicable (case analyses of published misconceptions research)
Currency · newest study 1994 · checked against its sources 2026-10-21 (automated, 1 of 1 entry) · not reviewed by a person

This is a theoretical claim about what a misconception is, set against the view that a misconception is a stable, coherent wrong idea. It is the core statement of the knowledge-in-pieces view.

Subclaims¶

q1 i? The authors argue that treating students as holding flawed, strongly held ideas that must be confronted and replaced overstates the discontinuity between novices and experts and conflicts with constructivism's premise that advanced knowledge is built from prior understanding; they propose a complex-systems view in which knowledge elements serve novices and experts in different contexts and learning is refinement and reorganisation. → Smith 1994

Evidence¶

Smith 1994¶

Smith, J. P., III, diSessa, A. A., & Roschelle, J. (1994). Misconceptions reconceived: A constructivist analysis of knowledge in transition. Journal of the Learning Sciences, 3(2), 115–163. doi:10.1207/s15327809jls0302_1

q1 · theoretical argument · i? · no effect size (argument) · n=not applicable (case analyses of published misconceptions research) · theoretical · r2

A critical evaluation of research on student misconceptions in science and mathematics (the volume is dated 1993/1994 and the article is often cited as 1993). Using case analyses, the authors accept the empirical results of misconceptions research but dispute the accompanying view that students' ideas are strongly held, interfere with learning, and must be confronted and replaced. They identify knowledge elements that serve both novices and experts "in different contexts and under different conditions" and sketch a theory that characterises the relations among many knowledge elements rather than naming single flawed conceptions, with knowledge "refinement and reorganization, rather than replacement" as the metaphor for learning. Coded from the published abstract; the full text was not read.

Discussion¶

The contrasting position is that children's ideas form coherent mental models constrained by presuppositions, which change when those presuppositions are reinterpreted (Vosniadou & Brewer 1992). Both views accept that learners' prior ideas shape what they learn; they disagree on whether those ideas are unified theories or many context-cued pieces, and so on whether instruction should replace a model or refine and connect what learners already have. Empirical findings that error patterns are unstable below mastery (Tatsuoka et al. 1989; Payne & Squibb 1990) and that attraction to an alternative conception can rise during instruction before it falls (Sadler 1998) fit the knowledge-in-pieces reading, though none of them was designed as a test between the two views.

Related Claims¶

• Children's apparently inconsistent answers about the earth's shape are largely explained by consistent use of alternative mental models — the contrasting coherent-model view
• Instruction that confronts science misconceptions (conceptual-conflict interventions, refutation text) produces conceptual change more often than standard exposition — the confront-and-replace practice this argument questions
• Students' rules of operation for signed-number arithmetic are applied inconsistently by non-masters and stably by masters — related
• The idea of discreteness is a fundamental presupposition that constrains students' understanding of the density of rational numbers — related