Cognitive dissonance or p-prims? Towards identifying the best way to overcome misconceptions in physics

TL;DR

This study compares two teaching strategies—cognitive dissonance induction and p-prim activation—for correcting physics misconceptions among middle school students, finding cognitive dissonance more effective for deep understanding.

Contribution

It provides empirical evidence that inducing cognitive dissonance is more effective than activating p-prim in overcoming physics misconceptions in classroom settings.

Findings

Cognitive dissonance outperforms p-prim activation in effectiveness.

Both methods improve understanding, but dissonance leads to deeper learning.

Effective strategies vary with the depth of conceptual change.

Abstract

In this classroom-based action-research project, I compared the following two approaches to check their effectiveness in helping students overcome physics misconceptions: Inducing cognitive dissonance or gradually building on students' previous knowledge activating the relevant phenomenological primitives (p-prims). This took place over a two-lesson sequence (each an hour long) using year 8 (12 years old) and year 9 (13 years old) top set students (N=87 in total), in the context of Newton's first law. Results were better for both year groups when inducing cognitive dissonance, which seems to be more effective not only with surface-level learning, but deep-learning as well.