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8We are meaning-making machines: we have ideas about how the world works. It is through teaching and learning that our naive ideas are tested and revised, or should be.
Children are not blank slates: we can make no assumptions about what they know and understand. Their personal theories must be revealed, and confronted. We must make their thinking visible.
To explore these ideas (personal theories, understanding and misconceptions), students were presented with the Hole-Through-the-Earth Problem, from Rosalind Driver. It goes something like this: Imagine that I drill a hole all the way through the planet, then I drop a very heavy ball into the tunnel. What would happen to the ball?
Children in grades 2, 4, 6 and 10 were asked to share their thinking about this unfamiliar problem. The result was captured on videotape, linked below:
The videos illustrate that children have ideas about the world, the content of which is related to their age, cognitive development, and experience. At each level, we observe the limits of their understanding. In the case of the older students, we notice the tendency to repeat what the students had learned in science class, and the struggle to apply those ideas to the unfamiliar scenario (not unlike the high school senior profiled in Minds of Our Own who, following a unit on electricity and magnetism in an Honors' Physics class, was unable to light a light bulb without the specific equipment used in class, much to the chagrin of her teacher).
As so dramatically documented in Minds and A Private Universe, a child's naive theories are difficult to change. Unless we make their thinking visible, misconceptions can stay with us through adulthood, despite years of schooling.
An equally interesting and troubling question is this: what are the misconceptions that we carry throughout our lives, about ourselves and our world? And how do we respond when those personal theories, those false pictures, are challenged?
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