The Importance of Refutational Teaching in the Psychology Classroom

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

Abstract

Studies across many disciplines have demonstrated that many college students enter their introductory courses with misconceptions. This includes biology (Alparsian, Tekkaya, & Geban, 2003), chemistry (Zoller, 1990), physics (Kim & Pak, 2002), statistics (Khazanov & Prado, 2010), history (Fogo, 2014), and psychology (Hughes, Lyddy & Lambe, 2013; Kendeou, Walsh, Smith & O’Brien, 2014). However, unlike other fields, psychology has few over-arching “concepts” (c.f., gravity, moles). Instead, many “factoids” make up a network of information driven by emotion, profit, logical fallacy and wishful thinking.
Studies of teaching techniques to dispel misconceptions have supported the use of refutational teaching, yet few textbooks incorporate this approach, and few instructors intentionally use refutation in their teaching. Most textbooks accurately cover the current scientific thinking; without a “refutational approach,” students encode the new, correct information, alongside their old, incorrect misconceptions (Chi, 2008; Ohst, Fondu, Glogger, Nückles & Renkl, 2014). In everyday life, they are more likely to encounter the misinformation and end up with a stronger memory for misinformation. Over time the new information fades.
Our presentation will primarily focus on specific data from our latest data collection this past academic year from a longitudinal study (time 3 data). We will show with our current data set that refutational teaching works with some students, and with some misconceptions, but not with all students or all misconceptions. These data suggest that a specific refutational approach works best for psychology - that it is best to first provide an explicit cue or trigger that the following information is a misconception, statement of the misconception, followed by repetition of the explicit cue. Then comes brief mention of the accurate, scientific evidence and a full explanation of why the misconception is wrong, and a full explanation of why the scientific information is the best information. We end with a discussion of why people might have the misconception and how to avoid it in the future (inoculation).
We will provide data from our latest study on specific student characteristics related to reading comprehension ability, compliance with doing assigned readings, individual difference variables in need for cognition (including metacognition) and motivation to learn (mastery versus performance orientation) and we will provide suggestions on how to incorporate this information into teaching—how to scaffold the learning environment for those students with poor reading skills; how to enhance mastery orientation, and how to develop metacognitive abilities. We will also present new data on the effectiveness of incorporating activities and assignments specifically targeting the most common misconceptions. We will end with a discussion of our current efforts at inoculation in order to minimize a “back-sliding effect” even among students who show strong initial change.

Authors

• Annette Taylor, University of San Diego

• Patricia Kowalski, University of San Diego