Background: In learning mechanics, students often believe that "force is exerted on moving objects." As this misconception called "motion implies a force" (MIF) is difficult to correct, various teaching methods have been proposed, such as showing refutational/explanatory text (Palmer & Flanagan, 1997; Takagaki, 2004),…

Background: A solid conceptual understanding is essential for students to succeed in all academic disciplines. Student misconceptions are correlated with their poor academic performance and high attrition rates. It is especially important to correct student misconceptions in science-based undergraduate engineering mechanics courses that cover…

The 21st-century mathematics classrooms should equip learners with well-grounded knowledge and thinking skills pertaining to geometry. However, Euclidean geometry remains one of the challenging, if not the most difficult topic for many learners. As a result, the purpose of this article is to interpret Grade 12 learners' learning difficulties in…

With the development of science and technology, the demand for programmers has increased. However, learning computer programs is not an easy task. It might cause a significant impact on programming if misconceptions exist at the beginning of the study. Hence, it is important to discover and correct them immediately. Chatbots are effective teaching…

Research indicates that troubleshooting activities that require students to reflect on pre-prepared erroneous examples, i.e. erroneous solutions to problems that correspond to common naïve ideas, impact their learning positively. These include asking students to diagnose erroneous examples; in other words, detect the conceptual errors and then…

This pilot study explores the effectiveness of a strategy for overcoming post-primary students' misconceptions within the topic of algebra. Although central to the study of mathematics, algebra can be an area of difficulty for many students. A misconception is typically classified as flawed understanding of a concept causing repeated errors, and…

Background: Learning processes are usually characterized by students' misunderstandings and misconceptions. Engineering educators intend to help their students overcome their misconceptions and achieve correct understanding of the concept. This paper describes a misconception in digital systems held by many students who believe that combinational…

Although the use of simulation to teach the sampling distribution of the mean is meant to provide students with sound conceptual understanding, it may lead them astray. We discuss a misunderstanding that can be introduced or reinforced when students who intuitively understand that "bigger samples are better" conduct a simulation to…

In the present set of experiments, we systematically examined the processes that occur while reading texts designed to refute and explain commonsense beliefs that reside in readers' long-term memory. In Experiment 1 (n = 36), providing readers with a refutation-plus-explanation of a commonsense belief was sufficient to significantly reduce…