AY 375 Fall 2014: Tenth Day Plan

Today we'll begin our broader pedagogical discussions and your Design-A-Section projects.

1. Students do come into a class with misconceptions related to the course material and how to learn/approach it.
2. Thinking about misconceptions as a misapplication of student resources can be useful in helping to address misconceptions.
3. Students not only have conceptual resources but epistemological ones as well.

Open the floor up for general questions and sharing about how sections are going. Some questions include:

• What did you learn from your midsemester evals? Anything surprising?
• What do you plan to change about your teaching in the remaining sections?

- Screening of “A Private Universe”

- Discussion questions:

1. What were the main points of the video? Did they surprise you or have you had similar experiences in section?
   1. Students come with their own ideas and preconceptions of scientific material. They hold on to those preconceptions unless they are clearly addressed in class and shown to be incorrect (and even then some of their preconceptions remain). Hands-on activities can be helpful. Diagrams can be so easily misleading.
2. How does Hammer reframe the problem of misconceptions?
3. What is a conceptual resource? What is an epistemological resource?
4. What are some techniques that Hammer suggests to help students productively use resources (either conceptual or epistemological)?
5. Closer is stronger. Is that wrong? Is it bad if someone holds this belief, since it leads them astray when considering the seasons? How might Hammer's arguments reconcile this conundrum?
6. If you, like the teacher in the video, became aware of these misconceptions your students have, how would you address them?
   1. Make it an opportunity to engage your students in the scientific process, advancing a hypothesis and trying to prove/disprove it, showing how they can determine which resources are applicable to this situation and which are not.
7. How do we incorporate these exercises of metacognitive learning into a course that is already saturated with conceptual material?