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Cognitive conflict supported by context to

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 COGNITIVE CONFLICT SUPORTED BY CONTEXT
TO OVERCOME MISCONCEPTION IN MATHEMATICS CLASSROOM

By Said Fachry Assagaf (F122476)

Introduction to science education and communication theories
21 April 2013
Word Count : 2519 words

Nowadays, research on students having misconceptions has been quite active. Various studies in
different subjects, for instance mathematics, also take this issues as their main part of discussion
(e.g. Chick & Baker, 2005; Falkner, Levi, & Carpenter, 1999; Li, Ding, Capraro & Capraro,
2008). Numerous of studies and publications are talking about misconception including the
theory, the description about stage of misconception, and also kinds of misconception students
have in the classroom (Klaasen & Lijnse, 1996). The subjects are not only addressed to students,
but also to teachers. The way teachers deal with misconception is one of the main objectives for
some studies. This fact shows that how important misconception is. When teachers did not aware
the misconception of students or even let the misconception goes, the wrong concept will be last
in students’ mind and resistant to change (Baser, 2006).

Falkner et al., (1999) shows through their research of 145 six-grade students about
misconception of “equal sign” when they faced on the question 8 + 4 =⊔+ 5. In their
investigation, the students answered either 12 or 17 should fill in the box. The students who
answered 12 thought that the box is the result of 8 + 4. The others tried to sum 8 + 4 + 5 or
8 + 4 = 12 + 5 = 17. This study reflected that even the “equal sign” was introduced in the first
grade; there still exist big numbers of six graders who have misconception about the sign.
Similarly, Li et al., (2008) investigated the comparison between sixth grade students in US and
China concerning the misconception of equality. They reported that the presentation of students
provided right answer for 4 item questions in China was 98% which is higher than in US was just
about 28%. In addition, the study case held by Leong (2010) investigating an elementary
students regarding the concept “equal sign” provided interesting result. The child has strong
concept however he still got difficulties involving words and money problems. These studies
explicitly confess the importance to overcome the misconception.

Overcoming misconception does not mean to avoid the misconception. Swan (2001) states that
“Misconception is not wrong thinking but it is a concept in embryo or a local generalization that
the pupil has made. It may in fact be a natural stage of development”. In same line, Keeley
(2012) addresses the misconception as preexisting ideas by students that are not completely
accurate to the scientific thinking. These definitions of misconception show that misconception
is not a bad thing that should be avoided (Keeley, 2012). Moreover, it cannot be avoided (Askew
& William, 1995). Even teachers hold some deeply rooted misconceptions that remained
unchallenged. Keeley (2012) strongly argue that “Everyone harbors misconceptions, regardless
age, socioeconomic background, or academic achievement”.

Instead trying to “avoid” the misconception, it is important to provide instructional experiences

that will confront students with their thinking and lead them through a process of conceptual
change (Keeley, 2012). Many studies (Baser, 2006; Ismaimuza, 2008; Limon, 2001; Peled &
Suzan, 2011; Kang, Scharmann, & Noh, 2004) suggest the cognitive conflict as an instructional
strategy in order to promote the conceptual change. As Limon (2001) argues that confronting the
prior knowledge of students leads to “reorganization”, “restructure”, or change their concept.
However, there are other studies show the negative result related to the cognitive conflict.

Limon (2001), in his article, post several problems exist as the result of the negative result in
applying the cognitive conflict to the classroom. One of the problems, he states, is about the
meaningful of cognitive conflict. How the conflict can be meaningful for students? How the
conflict can employ the students’ interest, curiosity, and needs in order to reach the conceptual
change? Context is the good answer to help the cognitive strategy overcome their lack of
meaningfulness. According to the online dictionary (http://www.thefreedictionary.com/context,
2013), context has two meanings; (1) related to linguistic which a text or statement that
surrounds a particular word or passage and determines its meaning, and (2) circumstances in
which an event occurs as a setting. The context here hold on the two meanings, linguistic and
setting.

Later on, I will describe more about the cognitive strategy as an instructional strategy and the
context as a supporting tool, in order to be one of the alternatives to deal with misconception.
Dealing with misconception does not mean to avoid or to ignore the misconception. It is to use
and even bring the misconception up from students.

Misconception & Conceptual Change

Students are not an empty vessel. They have their own thinking, ideas, and point of view as their
prior knowledge when facing on the topic in class. This prior knowledge can be used by teacher
as a starting point in learning (Fosnot & Dolk, 2002). Prior knowledge here means the initial
knowledge that students have in their mind including the misconception.

It is important to understand that for some studies, researchers often use the term such as
alternative frameworks, naïve ideas, phenomenological primitives, children’s ideas, etc to
describe students’ ideas which are not completely wrong. Meanwhile, they also have
preconceived notions, nonscientific beliefs, conceptual misunderstandings, vernacular
misconceptions, and factual misconceptions to imply the variety categorized of inaccurate ideas
that students have (Keeley, 2012). However, the misconception here focuses on the general way
to describe students’ inaccurate or partially accurate ideas.

These inaccurate or partially accurate ideas need to be changed or replaced. Once these ideas are
identified from students, a teacher should decide strategies to address these ideas. The strategy
should be meaningful enough for students in order to foster the conceptual change allow students
to overcome their ideas (Klaasen & Lijnse, 1996). However, the misconception also can be
provided by teachers to trap students in misconceptions in order to bring the meaningful learning
and build the awareness of misconception. For example, when the students already have an idea
about “equal sign” and can solve basic problems such as 8+4 = 12 correctly, the teacher may
provide more complicated problems e.g. 8 + 4 =⊔+ 5 in order to see whether there exist
misconception or not. By giving more variety problems, teachers will have an idea to identify the
misconception from students.
Furthermore, conceptual change describes learning as the interaction between students’
experience and his/her current concept. “The conceptual change often applied to situation in
which the target learning outcomes is to change students’ misconception” (Kang, et al., 2004).
Therefore, the way conceptual change work is to establish conditions where the students’
misconception can be made explicit and directly challenged the ideas to create a conflict. Limon
(2001) state that confronting the prior knowledge as misconception of students leads to
“reorganization”, “restructure”, or change their concept. In order to promote conceptual change,
he also posts three kinds of instructional strategies: (a) the cognitive conflict through anomalous
data, (b) the analogies as guidance, and (c) cooperative and shared learning to promote class
discussion. In this essay, we will focus on the cognitive conflict.

Cognitive Conflict as an instructional strategy

Conflict is happening when two perceptions, arguments, or ideas which are contradict each other
cannot find the agreement. Even in one person sometimes get a conflict with himself when they
decide to choose one or more options in his life. Undeniably, the conflict also emerges in in
teaching and learning process. Students may get a conflict when their answer is different with the
teacher answer. As human being, people have a need to reduce conflict (Kang, et al., 2004).
Therefore, experiencing the conflict may take an interesting part in learning.

Piaget, one of the influential psychology theorists, describes three main principles in
development of cognitive; assimilation, accommodation, and equilibration. Oakley (2004)
describe those three main principle as follows :
1. Assimilation means the process of putting new experiences into existing mental structure.
Children develop cognitive structure to help them make sense of their world. And when they
challenged with a new experience, they will put the experience into their structures as they
have already developed.
2. Accommodation refers to the process of revising existing mental scheme with new
experiences. It is happening when children encountered with a new experience and it does
not fit with the previous structure. Therefore, they must develop their new structures in
response to fix the new experience.
3. Equilibration addresses to the process of understanding the world while encountering new
experienced and conflict. Children attempt to fit their existing structure with the conflict in
order to reach the equilibrium.

The equilibration in Piaget’s theory refers to the cognitive conflict (Lee et al, 2003). Students
have their own prior knowledge as an existing structure or scheme. Then, they have to deal with
a new concept which is partly or totally different with their own scheme. Therefore, as a human
being who has needs to reduce the conflict, they attempt to find the equilibrium in order to fit
their scheme with the new concept.

In terms of the effectiveness of cognitive conflict, the researches elected two contrast results,
positive and negative. In one side, those in positive side are most from personal or radical
constructivist (Kang et al, 2004). They agree that cognitive conflict is effective to promote
conceptual change with several studies as the evidences. In other side, those in negative result
such as social learning theorists and science educators who emphasize the importance of social,
environment, and/or contextual aspects of conceptual aspects argue that students are often unable
to achieve meaningful conflict or even to become dissatisfied with their prior conception (Limon,
2001). In addition, Limon (2001) describe some variables that might reduce the meaningful of
cognitive conflict. He divided into three parts namely (1) variables related to learner, (2)
variables related to the social context, and (3) variable related to the teacher (see table 1). Those
variables (out of the teacher categories) will be reduced by the role of context later.

Table 1. Variables that might induce the meaningful cognitive conflict

No. Categories Variables
1. Related to the learner  Prior knowledge
 Motivation and interest
 Epistemological beliefs
 Values and attitudes towards learning
 Learning strategies and cognitive engagement in
learning tasks
 Reasoning abilities
2. Related to the social context  Role of peers
in which learning takes  Teacher-learner relationships
place.
3. Related to the teacher  Domain-specific subject-matter knowledge
 Motivation and interests
 Epistemological beliefs about learning and teaching and
about the subject-matter taught
 Values and attitudes towards learning and teaching
 Teaching strategies
 Level of training to be a teacher.

Lastly, Limon (2001) describes cognitive conflict paradigms involves (a) identifying students’
current knowledge. A teacher can gives pre-test in order to obtain the current knowledge and to
look for the misconception of students. (b) confronting students with contradictory information.
It will be better to provide contextual problem involving the aspect of meaningfulness of
cognitive conflict. And (c) evaluating the degree of change as a post-test to see how far the
conceptual change.

Context as a supporting tool

Nowadays, the use of context in mathematics classroom is not new. Some may argue that the
context means word problems which used for application at the end of a unit of instruction.
However, in this essay, context is being used as a tool to provide story or situation of problems
or tasks. According to Heuvel & Panhuizen (2005), the term “Context” in learning has two main
definitions related to (1) the learning environment: this includes the different situations in which
learning takes place and the interpersonal dimension of learning, (2) a task presented to the
students: including the words and pictures that help students to understand the task, or
concerning the situation or event in which the task is situated. These learning environment and
the task contexts are fit with the context which will support the cognitive conflict.
Duranti & Goodwin (in Gilbert 2007) explained four attributes of context i.e. the setting with
focal events, the behavioral environment of the encounters related to focal event, the use of
specific language, and the relationship to extra-situational background knowledge. Therefore, a
teacher needs to bring together the attributes of context as a social and as a perspective of
students to substantiate the meaningfulness of the context.

Furthermore, the context should not just word problems with meaningless, it should being used
to construct the mathematical thinking (Fosnot & Dolk, 2001) whether it is learning environment
context or task context. It should also truly problematic situation which confront students
misconception in order to allow them assimilate and accommodate the conflict with their ideas
about mathematics and supports the equilibration. By exploring their ideas, students are expected
to work with their own prior knowledge throught the task context. In addition, context related to
the learning environment can be provided by using tools or concrete things. For example, in term
of “equal sign” misconception, teacher can use students belongings such as pencils or books to
represent the equal sign for students. These concrete tools might engage children’s motivation
and interest.

Related to the social context, teacher can provides the mathematical congress to facilitate the
dialogue for the whole class. In this dialogue, students speak to one another. It is not like
traditional dialogue which is bounched from teacher to students, back to the teacher, then to
another students (Fosnot & Dolk, 2001). The dialogue employ arguments, questions,
explanations, from one another. The role of teacher as member of community facilitates,
monitores, and provides misconception as a problem context and counterexamples as conflict.

As conclusion, a misconception needs to overcome. Overcoming does not refer avoidance. It is

not a bad thing as what some people addressed. It can be useful since it can be categorized as a
prior knowledge of students. And the prior knowledge is a good starting point in learning
process. In overcoming the misconception of students, teachers should provide a strategy which
takes into account the conceptual change. One of the strategies is cognitive conflict. The
cognitive conflict addressed a concept to emerge the conflict. As Piaget’s theory related to the
equilibrium, people have needs to reduce the conflict.

However, the effectiveness of cognitive conflict is still on debate. In one side, some argue that it
can boost the conceptual change. On the contrary, some others post the lack of meaningful
cognitive conflict. Moreover, in order to reduce the lacks of cognitive conflict, the role of the
context is one of the alternatives. The lacks of cognitive conflict including (1) variable related to
learners, (2) variables related to social context in which learning takes place, and (3) variables
related to the teacher. Context here refers to the word, picture, or situation/environment that is
close to students’ life. It should also take into account the students’ interest, needs, and curiosity.
Context here also addresses to two main definitions; learning environment context and tasks
context. Related to the social context, providing math congress in order to build the math
community in the classroom might be useful to address the lack of role of peers and relation
between students-teacher. By providing the conflict in context, it may worthwhile to reduce the
lacks of cognitive conflict in two variables; related to learners and the social context.
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