Misconceptions

I actually found this article super interesting because it not only talked about the elementary students, but students at all levels. I think its sad that most college students don't really remember much about their elementary science education. In my personal experiences with science, I remember mostly from high school and how unhelpful my teachers were. Instead of focusing on teaching both the concepts and vocabulary, my teachers taught us as fast as they could and didn't really care if we remembered the information after we took the final. This article makes a great point when they say that we as students pretend to know what we are talking about by using the terminology, when in fact most of us are just using it to sound smart. The experiment that was done on the students shows that at all ages there is mostly partial understanding of concepts, which I didn't doubt at all. If I would be completely honest, there are many science concepts that I think I kind of know, but I really have no idea what I'm talking about. Teachers should be making sure that every year the students are remembering what they were taught the year before. The summer does a lot of damage to what we learn in school, and by pre-testing all of the students at the beginning of each lesson could help them remember or clarify their understanding of certain topics. Another way to get students to understand more is to make them use the text books and then have a visual of what they read in the text book. Repetition for students is key, well in my experience as a student it is. I really liked this article it brought up a great point, and made me think of ways to be a better teacher.