Chapter 12 page 271
--Students believe that plant food, rather than light, is the ultimate source of plants’ energy. You want to
persuade them that light is the ultimate source of plants’ energy.
--Students believe that literature is irrelevant to their lives. You want to convince them that literature is
relevant.
--Students believe that using integration strategies such as elaboration and explanation will not help them
do better on tests. You want to persuade them that these strategies will in fact help them.
--Students believe that it is all right to respond to insults by hitting or pushing the insulter. You want to
convince students that it would be better to respond by going to elected student mediators than to engage in
violence.
In other instances, you may decide that you do not have an ethical right to try to change students’
beliefs. But you may decide that you have a right to expose students to arguments on both (or all) sides of
an issue to help them make up their own minds. For example:
--A science teacher may believe that the evidence strongly supports the existence of global warming,
whereas some students do not believe that global warming really exists. But the teacher opts to allow
students to debate this issue without giving any hint of his/her own position on this issue.
--A social studies teacher might believe that the U.S. could not have won the Vietnam War even if it had
used different tactics. But the teacher decides not to give any indication of his/her beliefs when the class
discusses this issue.
In other instances, you may decide that an issue is so controversial that you do not even want to discuss
it in your classes, even when you give no hint of your own position. Possible examples of such topics are
abortion and the truth of religious tenets.
In instances when you decide to attempt to persuade students to change their beliefs, you need to
understand how students are likely to respond to the evidence that you present to them. As a teacher, you
will often be presenting information and evidence that are incompatible with your student’s current beliefs.
You will be a more effective teacher if you can anticipate ways in which students will respond to different
kinds of evidence that are presented in your class. At this point, you should have two skills. You should be
able to predict whether or not students will believe information you present to them. And you should be
able to predict the different ways in which students will try to explain away the information you present to
them. After making these predictions, you can better adjust your instruction to make it more likely that
students will change beliefs.
For example, suppose you are planning to try to convince students that heavy objects fall at the same
speed as light objects (excluding objects that “float” on air such as feathers and sheets of paper). You
prepare an experiment in which you stand on a sturdy table, drop a heavy book and a light book onto the
ground at the same time, and have students observe what happens. Each time that you practice doing this
experiment, you clearly observe that they hit the ground at the same time. However, because you have
learned about different responses to anomalous data, you realize that your students will probably discount
this experiment in some way. So now—before you ever go to class to do this experiment—you brainstorm
some of the ways in which students might discount the data. You consider several possibilities:
--reinterpretation #1: “You didn’t really drop them at the same time.”
--reinterpretation #2: “The heavy one really did hit a fraction of a second faster.”
--peripheral theory change: “OK, this experiment works, but only for books.”
Because you have anticipated possible responses to the data, you can now think of ways to make your
experiment better or to add new data that would help rule out these different ways of discounting data. You
can rule out the peripheral theory change response by doing the experiment with lots of different pairs of
heavy and light objects. You can rule out the first reinterpretation response by bringing in a device that can
release the objects without question at exactly the same time. You can rule out the second reinterpretation