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Misconceptions impede student learn- ing, especially in science. As teachers of earth science, we would be wise to identify misconceptions whenever pos- sible before launching new topics in our oceanography courses. A good way to do this is to pose creative, multiple- choice, PowerPoint questions that can be answered anonymously using student-response systems, “clickers,” in large introductory classes (Beatty et al., 2006; Caldwell, 2007) (Figure 1). Having taught many such classes for nonscience majors—mostly without clickers—since my very first laboratory as a teaching assistant in the evening OCN 101 course
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110 Misconceptions about the ocean
b y R o b E R t J . F E l l E R
at the University of Washington in sum- mer 1970 (taught by Eddy Carmack, by the way), I have come across stu- dent misconceptions too numerous to count. The very first one came during a one-on-one laboratory write-up help session in this class. The student was a freshman nonoceanography, nonscience major who wondered why people in the Southern Hemisphere didn’t fall off the earth. For some odd reason, this same student also had trouble solving rate x time = distance problems, not to mention difficulties with metric system conversions. With class sizes ranging from 15 to 415 in the 40+ oceanography
classes I’ve taught since 1970, one would think that few misconceptions would go unheard or unread on tests, but this is simply not the case. I still confront new ones all the time. Thanks to the current crop of students in my Fundamentals of Biological Oceanography class, a few more were added to the list just this semester.
What you do with misconceptions can vary quite a bit. Basically, I use a con- structivist inquiry approach built upon the conceptual change model (CCM;
Stepans, 2006). This learning model encourages students in the classroom to confront their own preconceptions, as well as those of their classmates, and to then strive to resolve them. The CCM has six stages: (1) students become aware
Figure 1. Example of a “clicker”—a multiple-choice, PowerPoint question that can be answered anonymously using student-response systems in large intro- ductory classes. The slide on the right includes the responses obtained anony- mously from my students (n = 89 nonscience majors). Here, the green bar indi- cates the correct answer. This slide shows that many students have not made the connection of tides as waves, or that water motion can be influenced by the tide. For some reason they view the tide simply as a change in the vertical height of water—how in the world could a wave do something like that?
This article has been published in Oceanography, Volume 20, Number 4, a quarterly journal of The oceanography Society. copyright 2007 by The oceanography Society. all rights reserved. Permission is granted to copy this article for use in teaching and research. Republication, systemmatic reproduction, or collective redistirbution of any portion of this article by photocopy machine, reposting, or other means is permitted only with the approval of The oceanography Society. Send all correspondence to: [email protected] or Th e oceanography Society, Po box 1931, Rockville, Md 20849-1931, uSa.
