engleski

Students’ confidence in their misconceptions about operant conditioning concepts: Do they change following instruction?

Students' ability to learn scientific concepts is limited by their preconceptions that can be inaccurate. Those pre-existed beliefs that are considered as misconceptions can arise from students’ efforts to make sense of what they experience (Vosniadou, 2008). Research shows that firm but incorrect beliefs are particularly difficult to change, even following instruction (Taylor & Kowalski, 2004). Conceptual change can occur either through restructuring or integrating new information into existing shemata (Hewson, 1996). We focused our examination of conceptual change on the concept of operant conditioning in students enrolled in graduate teacher education program. Previous findings suggest that students possess some preconceptions regarding this topic (Lamal, 1995 ; Scheldon, 2002). The metacognitive ability to evaluate one’s knowledge is critical to conceptual change (Maki, 1998). In the present study we examined concurrent metacognitive judgments that require the participants to make confidence judgments while performing the task (Schraw, 2009). The aim of the present study was to assess knowledge about the principles of operant conditioning in students and to explore how confident students are in their (mis)conceptions. The study examined whether misconceptions about operant conditioning diminish after students get acquainted with those concepts through Educational psychology course, and whether students become more accurate in their calibration. At the beginning of the course students were asked to explain the similarities and differences between the various concepts related to operant conditioning (reward, punishment, positive and negative reinforcement), and they rated the confidence in the correctness of their answers. Additionally, they had to recognize principles of operant conditioning in several examples from educational settings, explain their answer, and rate their confidence in both the answer and the explanation. The same task was administered following instruction. Initially, students held various misconceptions about concepts in operant conditioning (e.g. negative reinforcement refers to reinforcing undesirable behaviour), and greatly overestimate the accuracy of their explanations (average bias index computed according to Schraw, 2009, was 49). Compared to explanations of operant conditioning concepts, students are somewhat more successful in recognizing different examples of operant conditioning and are more accurate in their confidence judgements. They tend to be more confident about correct versus incorrect answers. However, they overestimate their ability to explain their answers. Students significantly reduced their misconceptions and improved their performance following instruction, but the accuracy of explanations was still low. Again there was a tendency to overestimate the accuracy of the answers, although bias indexes were significantly lower (e.g. 40 for explaining the concepts), indicating somewhat better calibration.

judgment of knowledge ; calibration ; preconception ; conceptual change

nije evidentirano