Highly prevalent but not always persistent: undergraduate and graduate student's misconceptions about psychology.

Although past research has documented the prevalence of misconceptions in introductory psychology classes, few studies have assessed how readily upper-level undergraduate and graduate students endorse erroneous beliefs about the discipline. In Study 1, we administered a 30-item misconception test to an international sample of 670 undergraduate, Master’s and doctoral students. Analyses indicated that participants identified and rejected the majority of misconceptions, with doctoral students performing better than their Master’s or undergraduate peers. In Study 2, we administered a revised version of our questionnaire to a novel sample of 557 students while controlling for number of years spent at university, psychology courses completed and need for cognition. Once again, we found that graduate students rejected more, affirmed less and reported lower levels of uncertainty than their undergraduate counterparts. Educational implications and future research directions are discussed

Cognitive Conflict Strategy and Simulation Practicum to Overcome Student Misconception on Light Topics

One way to reduce misconceptions can be overcome by cognitive conflict learning strategies with the help of simulation practicum instead of actual practicum. This study aims to determine whether there are differences in students' misconceptions before and after learning with cognitive conflict strategies as an effort to reduce misconceptions on light material. Research sample of 31 students. Data on the degree of misconception before the study was 0, 36 and after doing research was 0.17. The t-paired test results for the mean percentage of students' misconceptions on light material before and after learning differed at a significance level of 0.05. While, the results of N-Gain calculations to student achievement increase in overcoming misconceptions on light material were 0.3, that means the average students' achievement in dealing with misconceptions are in the medium category and cognitive conflict strategies combined with simulation practicum have a strong effect on reducing students' misconceptions on light material with a range of 2.91. Based on the results of the study it can be concluded that cognitive conflict strategies combined with simulation practicum can be used to reduce misconceptions that lead to increased student learning achievement. Further research is needed to explore students' misconceptions on other physics topics and can measure student misconceptions at each meeting so that students are more organized and developed in learning

Alternative psychotherapies: Conceptual elucidation and epidemiological framework

This article elucidates and defines alternative psychotherapies, as well as describes the variables that explain why some professional psychologists are prone to endorse these practices. First, the novel concept of “complementary and alternative psychotherapies” (CAP) is defined within the framework of the established hierarchy of clinical evidence. Second, we report a literature review to aid understanding of the main variables explaining why some clinicians prefer CAP. We review rejection of scientific reasoning, misconceptions about human nature, and pragmatic limitations of evidence-based practice

Rules and principles in cognitive diagnoses

Cognitive simulation is concerned with constructing process models of human cognitive behavior. Our work on the ACM system (Automated Cognitive Modeler) is an attempt to automate this process. The basic assumption is that all goal-oriented cognitive behavior involves search through some problem space. Within this framework, the task of cognitive diagnosis is to identify the problem space in which the subject is operating, identify solution paths used by the subject, and find conditions on the operators that explain those solution paths and that predict the subject's behavior on new problems. The work presented in this paper uses techniques from machine learning to automate the tasks of finding solution paths and operator conditions. We apply this method to the domain of multi-column subtraction and present results that demonstrate ACM's ability to model incorrect subtraction strategies. Finally, we discuss the difference between procedural bugs and misconceptions, proposing that errors due to misconceptions can be viewed as violations of principles for the task domain

An examination of the mediating role of salt knowledge and beliefs on the relationship between socio-demographic factors and discretionary salt use: a cross-sectional study

Background Discretionary salt use varies according to socio-demographic factors. However, it is unknown whether salt knowledge and beliefs mediate this relationship. This study examined the direct and indirect effect of socio-demographic factors on salt knowledge and discretionary salt use in a sample of 530 Australian adults.Methods An internet based cross-sectional survey was used to collect data for this study. Participants completed an online questionnaire which assessed their salt knowledge, beliefs and salt use behaviour. Mplus was used to conduct structural equation modelling to estimate direct and indirect effects.Results The mean age of the participants was 49.2 years, and about a third had tertiary education. Discretionary salt use was inversely related to age (r=-0.11; p&lt;0.05), and declarative salt knowledge (knowledge of factual information) scores (r = -0.17; p&lt;0.01), but was positively correlated with misconceptions about salt (r = 0.09; p&lt;0.05) and beliefs about the taste of salt (r = 0.51; p&lt;0.001). Structural equation modelling showed age, education and gender were indirectly associated with the use of discretionary salt through three mediating pathways; declarative salt knowledge, misconceptions about salt and salt taste beliefs.Conclusions Inequalities observed between socio-demographic groups in their use of discretionary salt use can potentially be reduced through targeted salt knowledge and awareness campaigns.<br /

Do we expect too much? Reflection on chemistry content in higher education

Education research in the 1970s, like other related areas, was dominated by quantitative work¹ during an era for which social sciences sought to draw upon the successful scientific approach typically used in the physical sciences (in particular) to investigate teaching and learning.¹’² So if we felt a cohort of students did not understand some con¬cept, we tried to find out whether or not a different teach¬ing approach could fix their misconceptions.³ But how to do this? Well, drawing on a scientific approach, we would divide the class or classes up, teach one cohort the same way we always had, and the other cohort in our new way, and evaluate any differences in conceptual understanding using, e.g. a standardized topic test. Differences would be examined for statistical significance of evidence that our new approach to teaching had worked. And this is the way much research was done at the time. Control of variables, randomized sampling, and so on, were all embedded in such an approach to educational research