Do Conceptual Change Interventions in Biology Work?

Have you heard about how toilets in the northern hemisphere flush clockwise, whereas they flush counterclockwise in the southern hemisphere? Yeah, that’s not a thing. Or, have you heard about how students learn better when you teach to their learning style? Yup, not a thing, either. Okay, one more: how about the whole left-brain, right-brain distinction? You guess it: not a thing. Now, there’s no shame in holding misconceptions - everyone does. But, when we realize we hold a misconception, we should want to change it, right? The trick is: what we learn is “sticky” - it’s hard to change people’s prior knowledge, including the inaccurate knowledge. (Come back to this post in a month to see whether you remember the toilet thing or not.) But changing misconceptions is a significant part of what teachers have to do, particularly in disciplines where there is a lot of inaccurate “common” knowledge, like biology. What are some good ways to do that?

Well, Aleknavičiūtėan and colleagues (2023) have done an extensive review of 30 years of research on conceptual change in biology, and they have some promising answers. In short, refutation texts seem to work well, but the effects seem stronger for simpler topics, like how the human circulatory system works (it’s a double loop!) compared to, say, misconceptions about molecular biology. And, like many areas of education research, the larger the sample size, the smaller the observed effect. Overall, there’s still lots of work to be done, but for the moment my prior knowledge about how to enact conceptual change in biology is firmly in the “use refutation texts and techniques” camp. Let’s hope I don’t have to flush that idea down the toilet someday.