Teaching challenge

Ms Brown is confident about what she wants pupils to learn. However, she is often surprised by the gaps in pupils’ knowledge and the misconceptions they sometimes hold. How can she plan to address gaps and misconceptions so all pupils can access the curriculum?

Key idea

Teachers should proactively find out about pupil prior knowledge and deliberately address common misconceptions and pupil knowledge gaps.

Evidence summary

Gaps in pupil prior knowledge and implications for individual needs

Pupils enter the classroom with different prior knowledge. For example, some may have been exposed to a concept intentionally the previous school year, while other teachers did not prioritise the same concept; some may have been introduced to it at home or through personal interest, while others may not. These knowledge gaps have consequences for pupils’ understanding: for example, if they lack important vocabulary, they may not be able to read a text, or may simply misunderstand it (Willingham, 2006). Ms Brown needs to identify who knows what if she is to make new ideas comprehensible by linking them to pupils’ existing knowledge.

Watching out for misconceptions

Misconceptions are potentially more problematic than knowledge gaps. Misconceptions are distinct from knowledge gaps (where pupils know nothing about a topic) and from errors (for example, a spelling mistake): they are beliefs which conflict with what is to be learned (Chi, 2009). A knowledge gap or an error can be addressed relatively simply but a misconception, whether held by pupils already or developed during a topic, may be harder to address. For example, if pupils believe that an apostrophe should be added whenever they see a plural ‘s’, this is harder for Ms Brown to influence than if a pupil forgot or had never been introduced to the rule.

Most misconceptions are specific to the topic being taught. For example, a common misconception in adding fractions is that pupils should add the numerators and the denominators together. Ms Brown needs to identify common misconceptions: her more-experienced colleagues may have valuable knowledge here. Once Ms Brown has identified likely misconceptions in an upcoming topic, she can check whether pupils have those misconceptions and can seek to overcome them.

Responding to pupil needs

Ms Brown can anticipate and respond to pupils’ knowledge gaps and misconceptions. Once she has identified the knowledge pupils need to understand a new idea, and the potential misconceptions they may hold or develop, she can design checks of pupil understanding to uncover these barriers for this knowledge (Christodoulou, 2017).

Where she identifies knowledge gaps, she can address them by explicitly teaching anything pupils must know to understand a topic, for example, prerequisite vocabulary, or knowledge which has been introduced in previous years. Where she identifies misconceptions, she can address them by offering analogies which bridge between pupils’ existing knowledge and their misconception (Luciarello & Naff, n.d.). For example, if pupils believe objects sink because they are heavy (a misconception which confuses weight with density), she can give the example of a ship – which is obviously heavy, but floats – and use this to help pupils appreciate their misconception.

Developing pupils’ subject knowledge also helps all pupils in two ways:

By ensuring pupils have increasingly developed and organised mental models upon which they can draw.
By reducing the new information actively being processed in pupils’ limited working memory (Sweller et al., 1988).

Nuances and caveats

While there is much overlap between what pupils know, each pupil will also have unique areas of prior knowledge (and lack of knowledge), based on individual experiences. Identifying exactly what each pupil knows would be impossible for Ms Brown: it’s more important that she identifies the most important knowledge for a topic and whether all pupils know that than that she identifies everything they do and don’t know (Christodoulou, 2017).

Key takeaways

Ms Brown can better tackle pupil knowledge gaps and misconceptions by understanding that:

a key reason for differing pupil needs is their different levels of prior knowledge
pupils may have – or develop – misconceptions: incorrect beliefs about a topic or subject
teachers can identify and overcome these incomplete mental models by using knowledge of subject and common misconceptions, for example to generate analogies based on existing knowledge

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