Softening the Landing: Approaches to Facilitating Conceptual Change for Science Museum Educators

ABSTRACT

In this article, we describe some of the common misconceptions guests have expressed while visiting a Museum of Natural History and Science, along with ways in which museum educators had reacted to and/or responded to guests’ misconceptions. Correcting commonly held misconceptions can be difficult, especially when guests are emotionally invested in their conceptual understandings or beliefs. Therefore, in this article, we further describe what conceptual change is and present two approaches museum educators can utilize to facilitate conceptual change. Specifically, we discuss a Refutation Approach and Inquiry Approach to facilitating conceptual change, and support museum educators’ use of both or either approach in an enthusiastic fashion, without hindering guests’ exploratory spirit. We conclude this article with some words of encouragement to educational researchers, museum educators, and museum enthusiasts.

KEYWORDS:

• Conceptual change
• inquiry
• refutation
• misconceptions
• museum education

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the staff and directors (Regina Hall and Tony Lawson) at Cincinnati Museum Center.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

About the authors

Marcus Johnson is the Co-Director of the Developmental and Learning Sciences (DLS) Research Laboratory and Associate Professor of Educational Studies at the University of Cincinnati. He has an academic background in both Human Development and Educational Psychology, and his area of research is “motivation in education.”

Adam Chekour is an Assistant Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cincinnati, Blue Ash. His research focuses on student critical thinking and problem solving in STEM education.

Ashley Vaughn is the Associate Director for the Center for Integrative Natural Science and Mathematics (CINSAM) at Northern Kentucky University. Her areas of research interest include conceptual change, motivation, and science education.

Gita Taasoobshirazi is an assistant professor of statistics at Kennesaw State University. Her research examines multilevel, longitudinal, and structural equation models of problem solving in math and science.

ORCID

Ashley R. Vaughn http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7598-8410

Notes

1 This is a misconception. While Mastodons and Wooly Mammoths may have roamed the Earth together over 12,000 years ago, they are two different species of the order of Proboscidea. Neither roamed the Earth 200+ million years ago alongside the reptilian dinosaurs many people think of from the Triassic and Jurassic periods.

2 In 2016 the Museum of Natural History and Science within the Cincinnati Museum Center began undergoing renovations. Interviews with docents and museum personnel took place prior to renovations.

3 The original intent of the interviews was to identify some of the common misconceptions museum guests came to the museum center with, so that possible conceptual change interventions could be generated and tested. A total of 8 museum educators with 1.5–17.5 years of experience in their positions, volunteered to participate in the interviews.

4 Spock, “The Puzzle of Museum Educational Practice,” 167.

5 Falk and Dierking, “Learning from Museums.”

6 Misra, “The ‘Atlas of Inequality’ Maps Micro-Level Segregation.”

7 Ormrod, “Human Learning.”

8 Nadelson et al., “Conceptual Change in Science Teaching and Learning.”

9 Adams et al., “Sociocultural Frameworks of Conceptual Change.”

10 Sinatra, Kienhues, and Hofer, “Addressing Challenges to Public Understanding of Science.”

11 Note: the two approaches to facilitating conceptual change that we present here are not an exhaustive list of approaches/strategies to facilitating conceptual change, but rather two approaches we believe museum educators can readily consider.

12 Sinatra et al., “Bridging Reading Comprehension and Conceptual Change in Science Education.”

13 For more on refutation texts, see Muis et al., “Main and Moderator Effects of Refutation … ” and Prinz, Golke, and Wittwer, “Refutation Texts Compensate for Detrimental Effects of Misconceptions … ”

14 For more on inquiry-based learning, see Wadman, Driscoll, and Kurzawa “Creating Communicative Scientists” and Cherif et al., “Which Sweetener Is Best for Yeast?”

15 Krange, Silseth, and Pierroux “Peers, Teachers and Guides”

16 Gardner, Kaplan, and Pugh, “Museums as Contexts for Transformative Experiences and Identity Exploration.”

17 Yoon et al., “How Augmented Reality Enables Conceptual Understanding of Challenging Science Content.”

18 Kennedy et al., “Re-living Paleontology”

Additional information

Funding

We wish to thank the late Dr. Sam Stringfield for his support of museum research.