Misconceptions About Topics From Educational Psychology: Prevalence and Persistence Among Preservice Teachers in Germany

• In Event: 66.027 - Ask for Evidence: Identifying, Preventing, and Counteracting Scientific and Educational Myths

Abstract

To ensure quality of teaching and learning, it is important that teachers do not hold misconceptions about topics from educational psychology because they will act as distributors of knowledge. In order to prevent and counteract misconceptions, corrective action should be applied at an early stage, that is, with preservice teachers. The aims of this study were to shed light on both the prevalence of misconceptions among preservice teachers as well as on whether preservice teachers would change their minds when presented with either empirical or anecdotal refutations.
Psychological misconceptions can be defined as beliefs in wrong and popular assumptions that are contradictory to results from psychological research (e.g., Bensley & Lilienfeld, 2015). An example of a common misconception from the field of educational psychology is “Learning styles of teachers should be matched to learning styles of students” (see Bruyckere, Kirschner, & Hulshof, 2015). International research indicates that myths like the above-mentioned are prevalent among (preservice) teachers (e.g., Dekker, Lee, Howard-Jones, & Jolles, 2012). However, whether educational psychology myths are common among preservice teachers in Germany has not been investigated yet. Additionally, it is also relevant whether misconceptions can be refuted by empirical evidence. In fact, there is growing evidence that (preservice) teachers rather concentrate on experience-based instead of evidence-based knowledge (e.g., Bråten & Ferguson, 2015; Parr & Timperley, 2008; Williams & Coles, 2007).
A sample of N = 937 German preservice teachers (77.5% female, M = 22.07 years, SD = 3.40) participated in an online-survey. Participants’ agreement with claims about general science topics (e.g., evolution, climate change) and about specific topics from educational psychology (e.g., learning styles, class size) was assessed on a five-point Likert scale. Further, participants read a short text regarding each specific topic from educational psychology which informed them about the current status of research in the form of either a summary of empirical studies (i.e., empirical version) or in the form of a personal report by companioned teachers (i.e., anecdotal version). After reading this text, participants were asked to indicate their agreement with the specific claim again.
Results showed that misconceptions about several educational psychology topics were highly prevalent among preservice teachers while dependent t-tests for paired samples indicated that misconceptions in general science topics were less prevalent (t(936) = -94.944, p < .001, d = 4.47). Regarding the question of change in misconceptions after reading about either empirical or anecdotal evidence, analyses of variance (ANOVAs) with repeated measures revealed statistically significant interaction effects for each topic, indicating a more pronounced change after reading the empirical version. These results suggest that a change of existing misconceptions seems to be possible. However, the percentage of participants changing their opinion (i.e., from rather or strongly agree to rather or strongly disagree) was low.
With the now gained awareness about the high prevalence and the difficulty in refuting these misconceptions, future work can concentrate on identifying reasons for these misconceptions as well as developing different interventions to reduce these misconceptions among preservice teachers before they enter their job life.

Authors

• Cordelia Menz, Heidelberg University

• Birgit Spinath, Heidelberg University

• Eva Seifried, Heidelberg University