Misconceptions of change

It may be difficult to know what counts as an alternative conception in some topics – and sometimes research does not make it any clearer

Keith S. Taber

If a reader actually thought the researchers themselves held these alternative conceptions then one could have little confidence in their ability to distinguish between the scientific and alternative conceptions of others

I recently published an article here where I talked in some detail about some aspects of a study (Tarhan, Ayyıldız, Ogunc & Sesen, 2013) published in the journal Research in Science and Technological Education. Despite having a somewhat dodgy title 1, this is a well respected journal published by a serious publisher (Routledge/Taylor & Francis). I read the paper because I was interested in the pedagogy being discussed (jigsaw learning), but what promoted me to then write about it was the experimental design: setting up a comparison between a well-tested active learning approach and lecture-based teaching. A teacher experienced in active learning techniques taught a control group of twelve year old pupils through a 'traditional' teaching approach (giving the children notes, setting them questions…) as a comparison condition for a teaching approach based on engaging group-work.

The topic being studied by the sixth grade, elementary school, students was physical and chemical changes.

I did not discuss the outcomes of the study in that post as my focus there was on the study as possibly being an example of rhetorical research (i.e., a demonstration set up to produce a particular outcome, rather than an open-ended experiment to genuinely test a hypothesis), and I was concerned that the control conditions involved deliberately providing sub-optimal, indeed sub-standard, teaching to the learners assigned to the comparison condition.

Read 'Didactic control conditions. Another ethically questionable science education experiment?'

Identifying alternative conceptions

The researchers actually tested the outcome of their experiment in two ways (as well as asking students in the experimental condition about their perceptions of the lessons), a post-test taken by all students, and "ten-minute semi-structured individual interviews" with a sample of students from each condition.

Analysis of the post-test allowed the researchers to identify the presence of students' alternative conceptions ('misconceptions'2) related to chemical and physical change, and the identified conceptions are reported in the study. Interviewees were purposively selected,

"Ten-minute semi-structured individual interviews were carried out with seven students from the experimental group and 10 students from the control group to identify students' understanding of physical and chemical changes by acquiring more information about students' unclear responses to [the post-test]. Students were selected from those who gave incorrect, partially correct and no answers to the items in the test. During the interviews, researchers asked the students to explain the reasons for their answers to the items."

Tarhan et al., 2013, p.188

I was interested to read about the alternative conceptions they had found for several reasons:

  1. I have done research into student thinking, and have written a lot about alternative conceptions, so the general topic interests me;
  2. More specifically, it is interesting to compare what researchers find in different educational contexts, as this gives some insight into the origins and developments of such conceptions;
  3. Also, I think the 'chemical and physical changes' distinction is actually a very problematic topic to teach. (Read about a free classroom resource to explore learners' ideas about physical and chemical changes.)

In this post I am going to question whether the author's claims in their research report about some of the alternative conceptions they reported finding are convincing. First, however, I should explain the second point here.

Cultural variations in alternative conceptions

Some alternative conceptions seem fairly universal, being identified in populations all around the world. These may primarily be responses to common experiences of the natural world. An obvious example relates to Newton's first law (the law of inertia): we learn from very early experience, before we even have language to talk about our experiences, that objects that we push, throw, kick, toss, pull… soon come to a stop. They do not move off in a straight line and continue indefinitely at a constant speed.

Of course, that experience is not actually contrary to Newton's first law (as various forces are acting on the objects concerned), but it presents a consistent pattern (objects initially move off, but soon slow and stop) that becomes part of out intuitions about the world and so makes learning the scientific law seem counter-intuitive, and so more difficult to accept and apply when taught in school.

Read about the challenge of learning Newton's first law

By contrast, no one has ever tested Newton's first law directly by seeing what happens under the ideal conditions under which it would apply (see 'Poincaré, inertia, and a common misconception').

Other alternative conceptions may be less universal: some may be, partially at least, due to an aspect of local cultural context (e.g. folk knowledge, local traditions), the language of instruction, the curriculum or teaching scheme, or even a particular teacher's personal way of presenting material.

So, to the extent that there are some experiences that are universal for all humans, due to commonalities in the environment (e.g., to date at least, all members of the species have been born into an environment with a virtually constant gravitational field and a nitrogen-rich atmosphere of about 1 atmosphere pressure {i.e., c.105 Pa} and about 21% oxygen content), there is a tendency for people everywhere (on earth) to develop the same alternative conceptions.

And, conversely, to the extent that people in different institutional, social, and cultural contexts have contrasting experiences, we would expect some variations in the levels of incidence of some alternative conceptions across populations.

"Some common ideas elicited from children are spread, at least in part, through informal learning in everyday "life-world" contexts. Through such processes youngsters are inducted into the beliefs of their culture. Ideas that are common in a culture will not usually contradict everyday experience, but clearly beliefs may develop and be disseminated without matching formal scientific knowledge. …

Where life-world beliefs are relevant to school science – perhaps contradicting scientific principles, perhaps apparently offering an explanation of some science taught in school; perhaps appearing to provide familiar examples of taught principles – then it is quite possible, indeed likely, that such prior beliefs will interfere with the learning of school science. …

Different common beliefs will be found among different cultural groups, and therefore it is likely that the same scientific concepts will be interpreted differently among different cultural groups as they will be interpreted through different existing conceptual frameworks."

Taber, 2012a, pp.5-6

As a trivial example, in England the National Curriculum for primary age children in England erroneously describes some materials that are mixtures as being substances. These errors have persisted for some years as the government department does not think they are important enough to make the effort to correct the error. Assuming many primary school teachers (who are usually not science specialists, though some are of course) trust the flawed information in the official curriculum, we might expect more secondary school students in England, than in other comparable populations, to later demonstrate alternative conceptions in relation to the critical concept of a chemical substance.

"This suggests that studies from different contexts (e.g., different countries, different cultures, different languages of instruction, and different curriculum organisations) should be encouraged for what they can tell us about the relative importance of educational variables in encouraging, avoiding, overcoming, or redirecting various types of ideas students are known to develop."

Taber, 2012a, p.9
The centrality of language

Language of instruction may sometimes be important. Words that supposedly are translated from one language to another may actually have different nuances and associations. (In English, it is clearly an alternative conception to think the chemical elements still exist in a compound, but the meaning of the French élément chemie seems to include the 'essence' of an element that does continue into compound.)

Research in different educational contexts can in principle help unravel some of this: in principle as it does need the various researchers to detail aspects of the teaching contexts and cultural contexts from which they report as well as the student's ideas (Taber, 2012a).

Chemical and physical change

Teaching about chemical and physical change is a traditional topic in school science and chemistry courses. It is one of those dichotomies that is understandably introduced in simple terms, and so, offers a simplification that may need to be 'unlearnt' later:

[a change is] chemical change or physical change

[an element is] metal or non-metal

[a chemical bond is] ionic bonding or covalent bonding

There are some common distinctions often made to support this discrimination into two types of change:

Table 1.2 from Teaching Secondary Chemistry (2nd ed) (Taber, 2012b)

However, a little thought suggests that such criteria are not especially useful in supporting the school student making observations, and indeed some of these criteria simply do not stand up to close examination. 2

"the distinction between chemical and physical changes is a rather messy one, with no clear criteria to help students understand the difference"

Taber, 2012b, p.33


So, I was especially interested to know what Tarhan and colleagues had found.

Methodological 'small print'

In reading any study, a consideration of the findings has to be tempered by an understanding of how the data were collected and analysed. Writing-up research reports for journals can be especially challenging as referees and editors may well criticise missing details they feel should be reported, yet often journals impose word-limits on articles.

Currently (2023) this particular journal tells potential authors that "A typical paper for this journal should be between 7000 and 8000 words" which is a little more generous than some other journals. However, Tarhan and colleagues do not fully report all aspects of their study. This may in part be because they need quite a lot of space to describe the experimental teaching scheme (six different jigsaw learning activities).

Whatever the reason:

  • the authors do not provide a copy of the post-test which elicited the responses that were the basis of the identified alternative conceptions; and
  • nor do they explain how the analysis to identify conceptions was undertaken – to show how student responses were classified;
  • similarly, there are no quotations from the interview dialogue to illustrate how the researchers interpreted student comments .

Data analysis is the process of researchers interpreting data so they become evidence for their findings, and generally research journals expect the process to be detailed – but here the reader is simply told,

"Students' understanding of physical and chemical changes was identified according to the post-test and the individual interviews after the process."

Tarhan et al., 2013, p.189

'Misconceptions'

In their paper, Tarhan and colleagues use the term 'misconception' which is often considered a synonym for 'alternative conception'. Commonly, conceptions are referred to as alternative if they are judged to be inconsistent with canonical concepts.

Read about alternative conceptions

Although the term 'misconception' is used 32 times in the paper (not counting instances in the reference list), the term is not explained in the text, presumably because it is assumed that all those working in science education know (and agree) what it means. This is not at all unusual. I once wrote about another study

"[The] qualities of misconceptions are largely assumed by the author and are implicit in what is written…It could be argued that research reports of this type suggest the reported studies may themselves be under-theorised, as rather well-defined technical procedures are used to investigate foci that are themselves only vaguely characterised, and so the technical procedures are themselves largely operationalised without explicit rationale."

Taber, 2013, p.22

Unfortunately, in Tarhan and colleagues' study there are less well-defied technical procedures in relation to how data was analysed to identify 'misconceptions', so leaving the reader with limited grounds for confidence that what are reported are worthy of being described as student conceptions – and are not just errors or guesses made on the test. Our thinking is private, and never available directly to others, and, so, can only be interpreted from the presentations we make to represent our conceptions in a public (shared) space. Sometimes we mis-speak, or we mis-write (so that then our words do not accurately represent our thoughts). Sometimes our intended meanings may be misinterpreted (Taber, 2013).

Perhaps the researchers felt that this process of identifying conceptions from students' texts and utterances was unproblematic – perhaps the assignments seemed so obvious to the researchers that they did not need to exemplify and justify their analytical method. This is unfortunate. There might also be another factor here.

Lost and found in translation?

The study was carried out in Turkey. The paper is in English, and this includes the reported alternative conceptions. The study was carried out "in a public elementary school" (not an international school, for example). Although English is often taught as a foreign language in Turkish schools, the language of instruction, not unreasonably, is Turkish.

So, it seems either

  • the data was collected in (what, for the children, would have been) 'L2' – a second language, or
  • a study carried out (questions asked; answers given) in Turkish has been reported in English, translating where necessary from one language to another.

This issue is not discussed at all in the paper – there is no mention of either the Turkish or English language, nor of anything being translated.

Yet the authors are not oblivious to the significance of language issues in learning. They report how one variant of Jigsaw teaching had "been designed specifically to increase interaction among students of differing language proficiencies in bilingual classrooms" (p.186) and how the research literature reports that sometimes children's ideas reflect "the incorrect use of terms in everyday language" (p.198). However, they did not feel it was necessary to report either that

  1. data had been collected from elementary school children in a second language, or
  2. data had been translated for the purposes of reporting in an English language journal

It seems reasonable to assume they would have appreciated the importance of mentioning option 1, and so it seems much more likely (although readers of the study should not have to guess) the reporting in English involved translation. Yet translation is never a simple algorithmic process, but rather always a matter of interpretation (another stage in analysis), so it would be better if authors always acknowledged this – and offered some basis for readers to consider the translations made were of high quality (Taber, 2018).

Read about guidelines for detailing translation in research reports

It is a general principle that the research community should adopt, surely, that whenever material reported in a research paper has been translated from another language (a) this is reported and (b) evidence of the accuracy and reliability of the translation is offered (Taber, 2018).

I make this point here, as some of the alternative conceptions reported by the authors are a little mystifying, and this may(?) be because their wording has been 'degraded' (and obscured) by imperfect translation.

An alternative conception of combustion?

For example, here are two of the learning objectives from one of the learning activities:

"The students were expected to be able to:

…comment on whether the wood has similar intensive properties before and after combustion

…indicate the combustion reactions in examples of several physical and chemical changes"

Tarhan et al., 2013, p.193

The wording of the first of these examples seems to imply that when wood is burnt, the product is still…wood. That is nonsense, but possibly this is simply a mistranslation of something that made perfect sense in Turkish. (The problem is that a reader can only speculate on whether this is the case, and research reports should be precise and explicit.)

The second learning objective quoted here implies that some combustion reactions are physical changes (or, at least, combustion reactions are components of some physical changes).

Combustion reactions are a class of chemical reactions. 'Chemical reaction' is synonymous with 'chemical change'. So, there are (if you will excuse the double negative) no examples of combustion reactions that are not chemical reactions and which would be said to occur in physical changes. So, this is mystifying, as it is not at all clear what the children were actually being taught unless one assumes the researchers themselves have very serious misconceptions about the chemistry they are teaching.

If a reader actually thought that the researchers themselves held these alternative conceptions

  • the product of combustion of wood is still wood
  • some combustion reactions are (or occur as part of) physical changes

then one could have little confidence in their ability to distinguish between the scientific and alternative conceptions of others. (A reader might also ask how come the journal referees and editor did not ask for corrections here before publication – I certainly wondered about this).

There are other statements the authors make in describing the teaching which are not entirely clear (e.g., "give the order of the changes in matter during combustion reactions", p.194), and this suggests a degree of scepticism is needed in not simply accepting the reported alternative conceptions at face value. This does not negate their interest, but does undermine the paper's authority somewhat.

One of the misconceptions reported in the study is that some students thought that "there is a flame in all combustion reaction". This led me to reflect on whether I could think of any combustion reactions that did not involve a flame – and I must confess none readily came to mind. Perhaps I also have this alternative conception – but it seems a harsh judgement on elementary school learners unless they had actually been taught about combustion reactions without flames (if, indeed, there are such things).

The study reported that some 12 year olds held the 'misconception' that "there is a flame in all combustion reaction[s]".

[Image by Susanne Jutzeler, Schweiz, from Pixabay]

Failing to control variables?

Another objective was for students to "comprehend that temperature has an effect on chemical reaction rate by considering the decay of fruit at room temperature, and the change in color [colour] from green to yellow of fallen leaves in autumn" (p.193). As presented, this is somewhat obscure.

Presumably it is not meant to be a comparison between:

the rate of
decay of fruit at room temperature		andthe rate of
change in colour of fallen leaves in autumn
Explaining that temperature has an effect on chemical reaction rate?

Clearly, even if the change of colour of leaves takes place at a different temperature to room temperature, one cannot compare between totally different processes at different temperatures and draw any conclusions about how "temperature has an effect on chemical reaction rate" . (Presumably, 'control of variables' is taught in the Turkish science curriculum.)

So, one assumes these are two different examples…

But that does not help matters too much. The "decay of fruit at room temperature" (nor, indeed, any other process studied at a single temperature) cannot offer any indication of how "temperature has an effect on chemical reaction rate". The change of colours in leaves of deciduous trees (that usually begins before they fall) is triggered by environmental conditions such as change in day length and temperature. This is part of a very complex system involving a range of pigments, whilst water content of the leaf decreases (once the supply of water through the tree's vascular system is cut off), and it is not clear how much detail these twelve year olds were taught…but it is certainly not a simple matter of a reaction changing rate according to temperature.

Evaluating conceptions

Tarhan and colleagues report their identified alternative conceptions ('misconceptions') under a series of headings. These are reported in their table 4 (p.195). A reader certainly finds some of the entries in this table easy to interpret: they clearly seem to reflect ideas contrary to the canonical science one would expect to be reflected in the curriculum and teaching. Other statements are less obviously evidence of alternative conceptions as they do not immediately seem necessarily at odds with scientific accounts (e.g., associating combustion reactions with flames).

Other reported misconceptions are harder to evaluate. School science is in effect a set of models and representations of scientific accounts that often simplify the actual current state of scientific knowledge. Unless we know exactly what has been taught it is not entirely clear if students' ideas are credit-worthy or erroneous in the specific context of their curriculum.

Moreover, as the paper does not report the data and its analysis, but simply the outcome of the analysis, readers do not know on what basis judgements have been made to assign learners as having one of the listed misconceptions.


Changes of state are chemical changes

A few students from the lecture-based teaching condition were identified as 'having' the misconception that 'changes of state are chemical changes'. This seems a pretty serious error at the end of a teaching sequence on chemical and physical changes.

However, this raises a common issue in terms of reports of alternative conceptions – what exactly does it mean to say that a student has a conception that 'changes of state are chemical changes'? A conception is a feature of someone's thinking – but that encompasses a vast range of potential possibilities from a fleeting notion that is soon forgotten ('I wonder if s orbitals are so-called because they are spherical?') to an on-going commitment to an extensive framework of ideas that a life is lived by (Buddhism, Roman Catholicism, Liberalism, Hedonism, Marxism…).

A person's conceptions can vary along a range of characteristics (Figure from Taber, 2014)

The statement that 'Changes of state are chemical changes' is unlikely to be the basis of anyone's personal creed. It could simply be a confusion of terms. Perhaps a student had a decent understanding of the essential distinction between chemical and physical changes but got the terms mixed up (or was thinking that 'changes of state' meant 'chemical reaction'). That is certainty a serious error that needs correcting, but in terms of understanding of the science, would seem to be less worrying than a deeper conceptual problem.

In their commentary, the authors note of these children:

"They thought that if ice was heated up water formed, and if water was heated steam formed, so new matter was formed and chemical changes occurred".

Tarhan et al., 2013, p.197

It is not clear if this was an explanation the learners gave for thinking "changes of state are chemical changes", or whether "changes of state are chemical changes" was the researchers' gloss on children commenting that "if ice was heated up water formed, and if water was heated steam formed, so new matter was formed and chemical changes occurred".

That a range of students are said to have precisely the same train of thought leads a reader (or, at least, certainly one with experience of undertaking research of this kind) to ask if these are open-ended responses produced by the children, or the selection by the children of one of a number of options offered by the researchers (as pointed out above, the data analysis is not discussed in detail in the paper). That makes a difference in how much weight we might give to the prevalence of the response (putting a tick by the most likely looking option requires less commitment to, and appreciation of, an idea than setting it out yourself in your own personally composed text), illustrating why it is important that research journals should require researchers to give full accounts of their instrumentation and analysis.

Because density of matter changes during changes of state, its identity also changes, and so it is a chemical change

Thirteen of the children (all in the lecture-based teaching condition) were considered to have the conception "Because density of matter changes during changes of state, its identity also changes, and so it is a chemical change". This is clearly a much more specific conception (than 'changes of state are chemical changes') which can be analysed into three components:

  • a change of state is a chemical change, AND
  • we know this because such changes involve a change in identity, AND
  • we know that because a change of state leads to a change in density

Terhan and colleagues claim this conception was "first determined in this study" (p.195).

The specificity is intriguing here – if so many students explicitly and individually built this argument for themselves then this is an especially interesting finding. Unfortunately, the paper does not give enough detail of the methodology for a reader to know if this was the case. Again, if students were just agreeing with an argument offered as an option on the assessment instrument then it is of note, but less significant (as in such cases students might agree with the statement simply because one component resonated – or they may even be guessing rather than leaving an item unanswered). Again this does not completely negate the finding, but it leaves its status very unclear.

Taken together these first two claimed results seem inconsistent – as at least 13 students seem to think "Changes of state are chemical changes". That is, all those who thought that "Because density of matter changes during changes of state, its identity also changes, and so it is a chemical change" would seem to have thought that "Changes of state are chemical changes" (see the Venn diagram below). Yet, we are also told that only five students held the less specific and seemingly subsuming conception "changes of state are chemical changes".

If 13 students think that changes of state are chemical changes because a change of density implies a change of identity; what does it mean that only 5 students think that changes of state are chemical changes?

This looks like an error, but perhaps is just a lack of sufficient detail to make the findings clear. Alternatively, perhaps this indicates some failure in translating material accurately into English.

The changes in the pure matters are physical changes

Six children in the lecture-based teaching condition and one in the jigsaw learning condition were reported as holding the conception that "The changes in the pure matters are physical changes". The authors do not explain what they mean here by "pure matters" (sic, presumably 'matter'?). The only place this term is used in the paper is in relation to this conception (p.195, p.197).

The only other reference to 'pure' was in one of the learning objectives for the teaching:

  • explain the changes of state of water depending on temperature and pressure; give various examples for other pure substances (p.191)

If "pure matter" means a pure sample of a substance, then changes in pure substances are all physical – by definition a chemical changes leads to a different substance/different substances. That would explain why this conception was "first determined [as a misconception] in this study", p.195, as it is not actually a misconception)". So, it does not seem clear precisely why the researchers feel these children have got something wrong here. Again, perhaps this is a failure of translation rather than a failure in the original study?

Changes in shape?

Tarhan and colleagues report two conceptions under the subheading of 'changes in shape'. They seem to be thinking here more of grain size than shape as such. (Another translation issue?) One reported misconception is that if cube sugar is granulated, sugar particles become small [smaller?].

Is it really a misconception to think that "If cube sugar is granulated, sugar particles become small"?

(Image by Bruno /Germany from Pixabay)

Tarhan and colleagues reported that two children in the experimental condition, and 13 in the control condition thought that "If cube sugar is granulated, sugar particles become small". Sugar cubes are made of granules of sugar weakly joined together – they can easily be crumbled into the separate grains. The grains are clearly smaller than the cubes. So, what is important here is what is meant/understood* by the children by the term 'particles'.

(* If this phrasing was produced by the children, then we want to know what they meant by it. If, however, the children were agreeing with a phrase presented to them by researchers, then we wish to know how they understood it.)

If this means quanticle level particles, molecules, then it is clearly an alternative conception – each grain contain vast numbers of molecules, and the molecules are unchanged by the breaking up the cubes. If, however, particles here refers to the cube and grains**, then it is a fair reflection of what happens: one quite large particle of sugar is broken up into many much smaller particles. The ambiguity of the (English) word 'particles' in such contexts is well recognised.

(** That is, if the children used the word 'particles' – did they mean the cubes/grains as particles of sugar? If however the phrasing was produced by the researchers and presented to the children, and if the researchers meant 'particles' to mean 'molecules'; did the children appreciate that intention, or did they understand 'particles' to refer to the cubes and grains?)

However, as no detail is given on the actual data collected (e.g., is this the children's own words; was this based on an open response?), and how it was analysed (and, as I suspect this all occurred in Turkish) the reader has no way to check on this interpretation of the data.

What kind of change is dissolving?

Tarhan and colleagues report a number of 'misconceptions' under the heading of 'molecular solubility'. Two of these are:

  • "The solvation processes are always chemical changes"
  • "The solvation processes are always physical changes"

This reflects a problem of teaching about physical and chemical changes. Dissolving is normally seen as a physical change: there is no new chemical substance formed and dissolving is usually fairly readily reversed. However, as bonds are broken and formed it also has some resemblance to chemical change.2

In dissolving common salt in water, strong ionic bonds are disrupted and the ions are strongly solvated. Yet the usual convention is still to consider this a physical change – the original substance, the salt, can be readily recovered by evaporation of the solvent. A solution is considered a kind of mixture. In any case, as Tarhan and colleagues refer to 'molecular' solubility (strictly solubility refers to substances, not molecules, but still) they were, presumably, only dealing with examples of the dissolving of substances with discrete molecules.

Taking together these two conceptions, it seems that Tarhan and colleagues think that dissolving is sometimes a physical change, and sometimes a chemical change. Presumably they have some criterion or criteria to distinguish those examples of dissolving they consider physical changes from those they consider chemical changes. A reader can only speculate how a learner observing some solute dissolve in a solvent is expected to distinguish these cases. The researchers do not explain what was taught to the students, so it is difficult to appreciate quite what the students supposedly got wrong here.

Sugar is invisible in the water, because new matter is formed

The idea that learners think that new matter is formed on dissolving would indeed be an alternative conception. The canonical view is that new matter is only formed in very high energy processes – such as in the big bang. In both chemical and physical processes studied in the school laboratory there may be transformations of matter, but no new matter.

This seems a rather extreme 'misconception' for the learners to hold. However, a reader might wonder if the students actually suggested that a new substance was formed, and this has been mistranslated. (The Turkish word 'madde' seems to mean either matter or substance.) If these students thought that a new type of substance was formed then this would be an alternative conception (and it would be interesting to know why this led to sugar being invisible – unless they were simply arguing that different appearance implied different substance).

While sugar is dissolving in the water, water damages the structure of sugar and sugar splits off

Whether this is a genuine alternative conception or just imprecise use of language is not clear. It seems reasonable to suggest that while sugar is dissolving in the water, the process breaks up the structure of solid sugar and sugar molecules split off – so some more detail would be useful here. Again, if there has been translation from Turkish this may have lost some of the nuance of the original phrasing through translation into English.

The phrasing reflects an alternative conception that in chemical reactions one reactant is an active agent (here the water doing the damaging) and the other the patient, that is passive and acted upon (here the sugar being damaged) – rather than seeing the reaction as an interaction between two species (Taber & García Franco, 2010) – but there is no suggestion in their paper that this is the issue Tarhan and colleagues are highlighting here.

When sugar dissolves in water, it reacts with water and disappears from sight

If the children thought that dissolving was a chemical reaction then this is an alternative conception – the sugar does indeed disappear from sight, but there has been no reaction.

Again, we might ask if this was actually a misunderstanding (misconception), or imprecise use of language. The sugar does 'react' with the water in the everyday sense of 'reaction'. But this is not a chemical reaction, so this terminology should be avoided in this context.

Even in science, 'reaction' means something different in chemistry and physics: in the sense of Newtonian physics, during dissolving, when a water molecule attracts a sugar molecule {'action')'} there will be an equal and oppositely directed reaction as the sugar molecule attracts the water molecule. This is Newton's third law, which applies to quanticles as much as to planets. If a water molecule and a sugar molecule collide, the force applied by the sugar molecule on the water molecule is equal to the force applied by the water molecule on the sugar molecule.

Read about learning difficulties with Newton's third law

So, 'sugar reacts with water' could be

  • a misunderstanding of dissolving (a genuine alternative conception);
  • a misuse of the chemical term 'reaction'; or
  • a use of the everyday term 'reaction' in a context where this should be avoided as it can be misunderstood

These are somewhat different problems for a teacher to address.

Molecules split off in physical changes and atoms split off in chemical changes

Ten of the children are said to have demonstrated the 'misconception' that molecules split off in physical changes and atoms split off in chemical changes. The authors claim that this misconception has not been reported in previous studies. But is this really a misconception? It may be a simplistic, and imprecise, statement – but I think when I was teaching youngsters of this age I would have been happy to find they have this notion – which at least seems to reflect an ability to imagine and visualise processes at the molecular level.

In dissolving or melting/boiling of simple molecular substances, molecules do indeed 'split off' in a sense, and in at least some chemical changes we can posit mechanisms that, in simple terms at least, involve atoms 'splitting off' from molecules.

So, again, this is another example of how this study is tantalising, without being very informative. The reader is not clear in what sense this is viewed as wrong, or how the conception was detected. (Again, for ten different students to specifically think that 'molecules split off in physical changes and atoms split off in chemical changes' makes one wonder if they volunteered this, or have simply agreed with the statement when having it presented to them).

In conclusion

The main thrust of Tarhan and colleagues' study was to report on an innovation using jig-saw learning (which unfortunately compared this with a form of pedagogy widely considered unsuitable for young children, so offering a limited basis for judging effectiveness of the innovation). As part of the study they collected data to evaluate learning in the two conditions, and used this to identify misconceptions students demonstrated after being taught about physical and chemical changes. The researchers provide a long list of identified misconceptions – but it is not always obvious why these are considered misconceptions, and what the desired responses matching teaching models were.

The researchers do not detail their data collection and analysis instruments and protocols in sufficient detail for a readers to appreciate what they mean by their results. In particular, what it means to have a misconception – e.g., to give a definitive statement in an interview, or just to select some response on a test as the answer that looked most promising at the time. Clearly we give much more weight to a notion that a learner presents in their own words as an explanation for some phenomenon, than the selection of one option from a menu of statements presented to them that comes with no indication of their confidence in the selection made.

Of particular concern: either the children were asked questions in a second language that they may not have been sufficiently fluent in to fully understand questions or compose clear responses; or none of the misconceptions reported are presented in their original form and they have all been translated by someone (unspecified) of uncertain ability as a translator. (A suitably qualified translator would need to have high competence in both languages and a strong familiarity with the subject matter being translated.)

In the circumstances, Tarhan and colleagues' reported misconceptions are little more than intriguing. In science, the outcome of a study is only informative in the context of understanding exactly how the data were obtained, and how they have been processed. Without that, readers are asked to take a researcher's conclusions on faith, rather than be persuaded of them by a logical chain of argument.

p.s. For anyone who did not know, but wondered: s orbitals are not so-called because they are spherical: the designation derives from a label ('sharp') that was applied to some lines in atomic spectra.

Work cited
Notes

1 To my reading, the publication title 'Research in Science and Technological Education' seems to suggest the journal has two distinct and somewhat disconnected foci, that is:

Research in ( Science ) and ( Technological Education )

And it would be better (that is, most consistently) titled as

Research in Science and Technology Education

{Research in ( Science and Technology ) Education}

or

Research in Scientific and Technological Education

{Research in ( Scientific and Technological ) Education}

but, hey, I know I am pedantic.

2 The table (Table 1.2 in the source) was followed by the following text:

"The first criterion listed is the most fundamental and is generally clear cut as long as the substances present before and after the change are known. If a new substance has been produced, it will almost certainly have different melting and boiling temperatures than the original substance.

The other [criteria] are much more dubious. Some chemical changes involve a great deal of energy being released, such as the example of burning magnesium in air, or even require a considerable energy input, such as the example of the electrolysis of water. However, other reactions may not obviously involve large energy transfers, for example when the enthalpy and entropy changes more or less cancel each other out…. The rusting of iron is a chemical reaction, but usually occurs so slowly that it is not apparent whether the process involves much energy transfer ….

Generally speaking, physical changes are more readily reversible than chemical changes. However, again this is not a very definitive criterion. The idea that chemical reactions tend to either 'go' or not is a useful approximation, but there are many examples of reactions that can be readily reversed…. In principle, all reactions involve equilibria of forward and reverse reactions, and can be reversed by changing the conditions sufficiently. When hydrogen and oxygen are exploded, it takes a pedant to claim that there is also a process of water molecules being converted into oxygen and hydrogen molecules as the reaction proceeds, which means the reaction will continue for ever. Technically such a claim may be true, but for all practical purposes the explosion reflects a reaction that very quickly goes to completion.

One technique that can be used to separate iodine from sand is to warm the mixture gently in an evaporating basin, over which is placed an upturned beaker or funnel. The iodine will sublime – turn to vapour – before recondensing on the cold glass, separated from the sand. The same technique may be used if ammonium chloride is mixed with the sand. In both cases the separation is achieved because sand (which has a high melting temperature) is mixed with another substance in the solid state that is readily changed into a vapour by warming, and then readily recovered as a solid sample when the vapour is in contact with a colder surface. There are then reversible changes involved in both cases:

solid iodine ➝ iodine vapour

ammonium chloride ➝ ammonia + hydrogen chloride

In the first case, the process involves only changes of state: evaporation and condensation – collectively called sublimation. However the second case involves one substance (a salt) changing to two other substances. To a student seeing these changes demonstrated, there would be little basis to infer one is (usually considered as) a chemical change, but not the other. …

The final criterion in Table 1.2 concerns whether bonds are broken and made during a change, and this can only be meaningful for students once they have learnt about particle models of the submicroscopic structure of matter… In a chemical change, there will be the breaking of bonds that hold together the reactants and the formation of new bonds in the products. However, we have to be careful here what we mean by 'bond' …

When ice melts and water boils, 'intermolecular' forces between molecules are disrupted and this includes the breaking of hydrogen 'bonds'. However, when people talk about bond breaking in the context of chemical and physical changes, they tend to mean strong chemical bonds such as covalent, ionic and metallic bonds…

Yet even this is not clear cut. When metals evaporate or are boiled, metallic bonds are broken, although the vapour is not normally considered a different substance. When elements such as carbon and phosphorus undergo phase changes relating to allotropy, there is breaking, and forming, of bonds, which might suggest these changes are chemical and that the different forms of the same elements should be considered different substances. …

A particularly tricky case occurs when we dissolve materials to form solutions, especially materials with ionic bonding…. Dissolving tends to involve small energy changes, and to be readily reversible, and is generally considered a physical change. However, to dissolve an ionic compound such as sodium chloride (table salt), the strong ionic bonds between the sodium and chloride ions have to be overcome (and new bonds must form between the ions and solvent molecules). This would seem to suggest that dissolving can be a chemical change according to the criterion of bond breaking and formation (Table 1.2)."

(Taber, 2012b, pp.31-33)

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Author: Keith

Former school and college science teacher, teacher educator, research supervisor, and research methods lecturer. Emeritus Professor of Science Education at the University of Cambridge.

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