Does analyzing and addressing student misconceptions improve student achievement? I would attempt to answer this question by administering short quizzes daily, or at least after teaching a complete lesson, that test for understanding of the main concept(s) that I was trying to convey through my lesson. Then I would look at the student responses to these questions, only 3-5 questions per quiz, and try to understand where they went wrong in the problems (i.e. find the misconception). If a student got a question wrong, but I cannot understand where the misconception is, I will ask the student to explain their thought process in a talk-aloud format in order to see where their thought process strayed. Then I will address the misconceptions I find; either with the entire class, if the majority of the student shared the misconception, or with individual students, if only a couple of students make the same errors. I will use performance on summative assessments to see whether student achievement (conceptual understanding of content) improved after I had addressed the misconceptions I found.
This is a really neat idea. I think it would also be interesting to test the idea of analyzing and correcting misconceptions with their peers to see how much effect this would have. Again, I like the idea and I am looking forward to what you find.
ReplyDeleteIf the quizzes are daily, make them one problem if possible. You won't have time to grade more every day. It will be interesting in your results to list the common misconceptions and somehow graphically represent how (if?) they changed on the summative assessment after reteaching.
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