CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
1.1 Background of the study
Misconceptions are not only to be observed in today’s children or students even scientists and philosophers developed and lived with many misconceptions in the past. Historical concepts and their changes are very interesting because similar ideas can help our students today: just like early scientists did they develop their own concepts by similar observations e.g., in regard to combustion. Ideas that are developed without having any prior knowledge of the subject are not necessarily wrong but can be described as alternative, original or preconcepts [1]. Every science teacher should know these preconcepts for his or her lessons – this is why many empirical researchers are working all over the world. Increasingly however, researchers are also finding chemical misconceptions in advanced courses. Because they cannot be only attributed to the students but mainly caused by inappropriate teaching methods and materials, they can be called school-made misconceptions.
They are clearly different from preconcepts that tend to be unavoidable. Inappropriate teaching methods can be stopped by keeping teachers up-to-date in their subject through advanced education. Over the years, the problem of conceptual and cognition of the processes in the life sciences has been the focus of research (Mintzes, Tombridge, Arnandin and Wandersee 1991, Songer, 1993) in Minztese&Novoak (1994). One of the major issues explored in these evolving research programme was students’ alternative conceptions in natural phenomena, and that of understanding the conceptual change (Wandersee, Minztes and Novoak, 1994). It was discovered that students come to class with a lot of naïve and prefixed, ideas about certain natural phenomena and construct knowledge individually using these ideas which may be resistant to change and which may lead to error and misconception. An error is operationally taken to represent a mismatch of student’s performance with the correct model. An Error as defined by the chambers dictionary is a blunder or mistake. Some scholars defined error in relation to performance and knowledge.
An error is an observable event or performance which in a way judged to be significant, differs from an expected ideal, (correct) model of performance.(Sanders & Crammer, 1992). A number of Nigerian science educators has investigated secondary school students’ error in mathematics (Isineyi, (1991), Akusoba, Okafor& Nwokolo,2003) discovered that secondary school students develop error in solving in-equalities. Ivowi,(1983) discovered that physics students develop error in certain physics concepts. Soyibo,(1985,1992) discovered preservices teachers errors in certain biological diagrams. Some non-Nigerian science educators also worked on error and discovered that even teachers have error in the subject they teach. In their work with South African pupils, Sandars and Crammer (1993), discovered that teachers may propagate erroneous ideas about respiration to their students through dishing out inaccurate information, as well as not using the available texts critically. It is pertinent to note recently that no work has been done on the influence of teachers’ error on students understanding of a concept, such as respiration. However these researchers choose to focus on respiration as respiration has been identified by many researchers as a difficult concept that is poorly understood by students’.(Soyibo, (1985) Igelstud, (1988).
The WAEC chief examiner’s report.(1995 – 2000) showed consistency in students’ poor performance in respiration. Respiration can be defined as a process by which food substances in the body are oxidized to release energy. It is an important biochemical process the understanding of which is critical to a meaningful appreciation of life at organism and community levels of biological organization. Understanding the events in cellular respiration is critical to an understanding of several of the conceptual understanding of topics in the biology discipline, including energy flow in the Ecosystem and metabolic activities of multicellular organisms. When students have difficulty in understanding a particular science concept, they develop erroneous views, which may impede the understanding of related concepts in order areas of subject matter. The identification of error is an important and obvious stage in remediation of students’ misconceptions and error. Driver and Easely,(1978) in Okoli, (2003) opined that not until the reasons for students misconceptions are understood will progress be made in instructional terms. It is these possibilities that have informed the need to identify errors held by secondary school students about respiration and the possible influence of teachers in the development of these errors.
The purpose of this study therefore is to identify the conceptual errors about respiration held by biology students and their teachers, and to determine the extent or the influence which teachers’ errors have on students in understanding of the concept respiration. The process whereby conceptual change occurs is of central interest in helping us to understand the process of learning, and is also of considerable importance when considering the design of instruction. Since the incompatibility between some common-sense understandings of the world and accepted scientific explanations is inevitable, it is necessary that instructors be able to affect whatever changes are necessary for comprehension of the scientific explanations to develop.
1.2 STATEMENT OF PROBLEM
Teachers can be astonished to learn that despite their best efforts, students do not grasp fundamental ideas covered in class. Even some of the best students give the right answers but are only using correctly memorized words. When questioned more closely, these students reveal their failure to understand fully the underlying concepts. Students are often able to use algorithms to solve numerical problems without completely understanding the underlying scientific concept. Mazur (1996) reports that students in his physics class had memorized equations and problem solving skills, but performed poorly on tests of conceptual understanding.it is in view of this that the researcher intend to investigate the effect of misconception of some basic science concept by junior secondary school student