In a study of 392 university students, Lord and Marino (1993) reported that only 7.1% of the students polled thought that evolution occurred because individuals better fit for the environment had a greater potential to leave a larger number of offspring, while the remainder selected misconceptions such as the purposeful striving toward higher forms (42.4%).
And some researchers justify their choice of misconceptions; for example, Fisher and Moody (2002) used several alternative terms but selected misconceptions as their primary term "to underscore the cognitive transformation required in order to achieve the scientific view" (p. 56).
Participants' responses to statement 16 ('Survival of the fittest' means basically that "only the strong survive"') were somewhat split with 40.8% (n = 31) affirming the statement and 59.2% (n = 45) selecting the misconception.
Teleological reasoning was operationalized as student agreement with three progressive/need based statements about evolution, selected from a corpus of misconceptions voiced by students in the instructor's previous classes on this topic.
They scored significantly better on the ten-question CINS-II after instruction (mean = 8.83, SD = 1.42) than before instruction (mean = 6.57, SD = 2.08; t(45) = 6.86, p < 0.0001, one-tailed with α = 0.025), meaning that they displayed fewer misconceptions and instead selected scientifically accepted answers.
A series of selected themes related to common misconceptions on STI/HIV transmission among truckers were identified for the communication strategy.
Because most of our target misconceptions appeared in more than one item (between 1 and 5 items), for each student, we totaled the number of distractors they selected that included a given misconception and standardized the counts by dividing by the total possible selections (e.g., for a misconception that appeared as a distractor in 3 different items we divided by 3).
We documented racial and ethnic variation in California women with the misconception, despite adjusting for selected socioeconomic factors; the remaining variation likely reflects unmeasured socioeconomic or cultural factors.
However, there exists high level of misconception about HIV/AIDS among the target groups selected in this study.
Although a small proportion of the general population selected option 6 in our study, an option that exacerbates "therapeutic misconception" could distort risk-benefit calculations by research participants, making true informed consent impossible [ 1, 7, 11, 12, 26, 36].
Prior reservations in hotels selected for stay should be done to avoid any kind of misconception.
