New Perspectives in Science Education

Children and students acquire misconceptions (naive conceptions) as they grow up. However, in some cases, misconceptions are acquired from science classes of school. These cases are referred to as “school-made misconceptions.” As an example, we focused on the formation of river gravel. Japanese rivers are shorter and steeper than continental rivers in Europe and sometimes flow from mountains like waterfalls. Japanese science textbooks in elementary school explain that square stones flow from the upstream of the river and gradually become small round stones as they flow into the middle and downstream. To clarify the misconception of gravel formed in the Japanese river, we surveyed the misconceptions of university students that occur after learning about river gravel in Japanese elementary schools. As a result, understanding of the formation process of gravel in the river is as follows: 1. the stone upstream of river is large, the middle stream is a little small and the downstream is small like pebbles and sand as being scraped or broken. 2. The stone upstream is angular, and as it goes downstream it gradually becomes rounder. This understanding is different from the gravel actually observed. The actual shape of the gravels are as follows: 1. Not only gravels of the same size but also gravels of various sizes are present in the river. 2. The roundness of the river gravel should not be uniform in the same place. 3. The shape of the river gravel (roundness) is not determined by the distance from the upstream to downstream, but by the distance from the point where the gravel is supplied. The cause of this misconception might be the descriptions of science textbooks in the fifth grade of elementary school. It also became clear that the teachers’s misconception might play important role in forming the school-made misconception.

Keywords: gravel, misconception, river, shape, formation, science textbook.