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response by videotaping the experiment so that students can analyze frame by frame when the objects hit so
that they can see that they really did hit at the same time.
Notice that if you didn’t know that students were likely to respond to your experiment by discounting it
in some way, and if you hadn’t tried to anticipate how they would try to discount the experiment, you
would have never thought of these ways to make your experiment better, nor would you have thought about
other experiments you could do or other data you could bring in.
When you decide to try to persuade students to change their beliefs about a topic, you should think
about data that you could use to try to make the persuasion successful. But then you must anticipate how
students might discount the data. By anticipating their various responses, you can proactively devise ways
to make the evidence that you have stronger, and you can think of different evidence that you can bring in
that will counter the particular criticisms that students have.