Making conservation planning accessible requires increasing the exposure of those responsible for spatial planning and coastal resource management to conservation planning concepts and processes, and at the same time dispelling misconceptions that might have developed from limited information.
Older students may have developed misconceptions about some of the key concepts addressed in this article.
(2011) characterized misconceptions as "scientifically inaccurate understandings that students have developed about natural phenomena," while simultaneously suggesting there could be additional and possibly "more appropriate" ways to represent students' erroneous ideas (pp. 418 419).
Some researchers have developed interventions specifically designed to address well-documented misconceptions of evolutionary theory, although their findings generally indicate that while gains can be made as a result of the intervention, the post-test scores remain unacceptably low.
We classify these findings as misconceptions, as they can be described as "scientifically inaccurate understanding that students have developed about natural phenomena" (Andrews et al., 2012).
We have developed and validated a tool for assessing understanding of a selection of fundamental concepts and basic knowledge in undergraduate introductory molecular and cell biology, focusing on areas in which students often have misconceptions.
"I had thought a man turned homosexual when there was not the right woman to save him, a misconception I had developed from the tragic union of Rimbaud and the poet Paul Verlaine," she writes, adding that she mistakenly considered homosexuality "a poetic curse" that "irrevocably meshed with affectation and flamboyance".
It is possible that if we had developed and piloted a larger number of items for each domain our ability to distinguish between distinct beliefs related to diagnostic misconceptions would have improved.
Unfortunately, the fictitious misconceptions have translated into real-life stigmas.
Many common student misconceptions have been described, and a successful instructor needs a suite of tools for correcting those misconceptions.
