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- Seasons: Many people believe that seasons occur because the Earth is closer to the sun during summer and farther away during winter. In reality, seasons are caused by the tilt of Earth's axis, which affects the angle and intensity of sunlight received by different regions.
blog.daisie.com/understanding-misconception-definition-examples-and-how-to-avoid-them/Understanding Misconception: Definition, Examples, and How to ...
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- Anne Marie Helmenstine, Ph.D.
- There Is a Dark Side of the Moon. Misconception: The far side of the moon is the dark side of the moon. Science Fact: The moon rotates as it orbits the Sun, much like the Earth.
- Venous Blood Is Blue. Misconception: Arterial (oxygenated) blood is red, while venous (deoxygenated) blood is blue. Science Fact: While some animals have blue blood, humans are not among them.
- The North Star Is the Brightest Star in the Sky. Misconception: The North Star (Polaris) is the brightest star in the sky. Science Fact: Certainly the North Star (Polaris) is not the brightest star in the Southern Hemisphere, since it may not even be visible there.
- Lightning Never Strikes the Same Place Twice. Misconception: Lightning never strikes the same place twice. Science Fact: If you have watched a thunderstorm any length of time, you know this is not true.
A misconception about science might also be referred to as preconceived notions, non-scientific beliefs, naive theories, mixed conceptions, or conceptual misunderstandings. Basically, in science these are cases in which something a person knows and believes does not match what is known to be scientifically correct.
MISCONCEPTION: When scientists analyze a problem, they must use either inductive or deductive reasoning. CORRECTION: Scientists use all sorts of different reasoning modes at different times — and sometimes at the same time — when analyzing a problem.
Strategies to explore misconceptions. Multiple choice questions – students must select the scientific answer from a series of options, one of which will contain the misconception (distractor). Example here for teaching osmosis. Refutation tasks – ask students to refute a misconception, explaining why it is wrong.
- The Dark Side of The Moon
- The North Star Is The Brightest Star in The Night Sky
- Memory Like A Goldfish
- Evolution Is Just A Theory
- Lizards Are Modern-Day Dinosaurs
- Venous Blood Is Blue
- Carrots Help You See in The Dark
- Colds Are Caused by Cold Temperatures
- Vaccines Cause Autism
- Lightning Never Strikes in The Same Place Twice
Unless you are talking about the 1973 studio album by Pink Floyd, the dark side of the moon doesn’t actually exist. When referring to the Earth’s only natural satellite, the dark side of the moon is a misnomer, mainly because it isn’t actually dark. To explain why this is the case we need to understand the orbit of our moon and a phenomenon called ...
This is a big one. Most people seem to think that our North Star is the brightest star in the night sky. It’s actually the 46th brightest star which doesn’t make it any easier to find. In fact the accolade of brightest star goes to Sirius, a star found in the constellation Canis Major, or big dog (one for the Harry Potter fans). Our North Star gets...
Goldfish actually have great memory encoding, storage and recall abilities. Researchers from Plymouth University were able to train goldfish to pull a lever to release food. Much like the classic lab rat, the fish were able to press the lever to release food in a particular part of the tank. The researchers then reduced the availability of the food...
Scientific and religious communities have battled over the creation of the earth for millennia. Darwin’s theory of evolution is a pillar of the scientific argument. This however is often thrown back as ‘just a theory.’ Looking at this more closely, it becomes an argument, not about the content but over semantics. The word ‘theory’ comes from the Gr...
It’s easy to look at our snakes and lizards alive today and assume that they are long distant cousins of the dinosaurs. Actually to find the closest living relatives to the dinosaurs we must look to the skies. That’s right: birds. Our feathered friends are descendants of the oldest known bird species the Archaeopteryx, alive around 150 million year...
This one is a completely understandable mistake to make. For one, most reference images for human hearts represent the blood flow with two colours (red and blue). This is primarily to distinguish between oxygenated blood (with oxygen) depicted in red and deoxygenated blood (without oxygen) depicted in blue. This makes the resulting image much easie...
Yes and no. Vitamin A is actively metabolised in photopigments in our eyes which deal with low light vision. As carrots contain a high level of vitamin A, they are thought to help you see in the dark. In fact, you would have to eat a huge amount of them to see any benefit. This myth may have been perpetuated by some very clever carrot PR during the...
Who hasn’t heard the phrase, “Put a coat on, you’ll catch a cold,” shouted from the other room at least once in their lives? More people tend to catch the cold in winter so it’s easy to assume it’s the cold weather causing it. The common cold is a rhinovirus and is usually transmitted through person-to-person contact or droplets in the air. For exa...
No!This one cannot be shouted loudly enough. In 1999 Andrew Wakefield published a paper in The Lancet claiming to have found a link between the MMR vaccine and autism. This caused many families to decide not to vaccinate their children against these potentially fatal diseases. What the paper failed to include was that the 12 children tested were ca...
Lightning strikes our planet on average 100 times a second so logically this cannot be true. Lightning strikes when there is an imbalance between the charge of particles in the clouds and the earth. Nature seeks to right the imbalance between negatively charged clouds and the positively charged earth. It does so by sending an electrical current bet...
Scientific misconceptions are commonly held beliefs about science that have no basis in actual scientific fact. Scientific misconceptions can also refer to preconceived notions based on religious and/or cultural influences.
Scientific everyday word meanings is a list of examples of words that have both everyday and scientific meanings, which might lead to misconceptions.
