All learning is relearning
Where did the concept of “elicit, confront, resolve” come from?
We often imagine that ideal learning happens the same way we often imagine ideal teaching*: We enter a room, students are waiting with anticipation of the new topic, the blackboard is clean and we can dive in and start drawing a picture from scratch. The students have no prior knowledge (or only exactly the prior knowledge we want them to have) and it is organized exactly the way we want it to be. The reality is, of course, different. The blackboard is hardly ever clean when we enter the room. And what is worse: Everybody always has a more or less articulate idea on any topic, and those ideas will interfere with any new information or theory that the teacher wants to convey.
Kolb states that a lot of resistance to new ideas stems from their conflict with pre-existing ideas that are inconsistent with the new ideas we are trying to convey. From this, he suggests an education process that has been termed “elicit, confront, resolve” by others later (compare, for example, McDermott’s (1990) Millikan lecture), which Kolb describes as “If the education process begins by bringing out the learner’s beliefs and theories, examining and testing them, and then integrating the new, more refined ideas into the person’s belief system, the learning process will be facilitated”.
The new ideas can enter the learner’s belief system in two ways: By integration or substitution. According to Kolb, integration lets the new ideas become part of a highly stable conception of the world, whereas substitution can lead to a dual theory of the world where both ideas exist in parallel** and where the reversion to earlier understanding is a possibility.
The challenge is now to successfully integrate the new ideas with the pre-existing ideas. While for example Muller et al. (2008) show that explicitly stating misconceptions helps subsequent learning of the correct conceptions, there is still no easy fix that could routinely be used in university teaching (at least that I am aware of). Plenty of work to do still! :-)
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*of course, this is not _my_ idea of ideal teaching
**a nice example of two parallel ideas about gravity is shown in Derek Muller’s video on “misconceptions about falling objects” where the interviewees explicitly state what they expect will happen, which is in contrast with what science told them will happen.
Taxonomy of multiple choice questions | Adventures in Oceanography and Teaching says:
[…] on student misconceptions. Offering typical student misconceptions as possible answers is a way to elicit a misconception, so it can be confronted and resolved in a next […]
What do I want from my students – sense-making or answer-making? | Adventures in Oceanography and Teaching says:
[…] Another question is “do I need to listen to students’ ideas and reasoning and what are the benefits of listening to students’ ideas?”. Again, this is a question that I am guessing many people I have recently worked with would find strange. Why would I listen to student reasoning that doesn’t lead to the correct answer, or student reasoning that is different from how I want them to reason? Yes, I might learn something about where they go wrong, which might make it easier for me support them in getting it right. But isn’t it a really bad idea to expose the other students to something that is wrong? I would argue that no, it is not a bad idea. Students need to learn to distinguish between good reasoning and bad reasoning. And they can only do that if they see both good and bad reasoning, and learn to figure out why one is good and one is bad. I know many people are very reluctant of having students explain their reasoning that lead them to a wrong answer. It takes time and it doesn’t seem to lead towards the correct answer. But then what do we want? Answer-making or sense-making? Sense-making might involve taking a wrong turn occasionally, and realizing why it was a wrong turn before taking the right turn in the end. If the wrong answer isn’t elicited, it can’t be confronted or resolved. […]
Experiment: Ice cubes melting in fresh water and salt water – Mirjam S. Glessmer says:
[…] Students usually assume that the ice cube in salt water will melt faster than the one in fresh water, “because salt is used to de-ice streets in winter”. Have students explicitly state their hypothesis (“the one in salt water will melt faster!”), so when they measure the time it takes the ice cubes to melt, they realize that their experiment does not support their hypothesis and start discussing why that is the case. (Elicit the misconception, so it can be confronted and resolved!) […]