2017 ASHS Annual Conference

Gardeners of all ages, including undergraduate students, struggle with myths or misconceptions about plants or practices when gardening. One of the learning objectives of an introductory horticulture course at Iowa State University, Home Horticulture (Hort 121), focuses on students discussing some of these myths and the scientific concepts that help debunk them. During the first week of spring semester 2017 and prior to discussing these myths, students were asked to voluntarily complete a 52 question, online survey (25 short answer and 27 true/false) about some of these myths. Out of 86 class members, 71 completed the survey (82.5% response rate). After each question, students were asked to rate how confident they were in their answer. Of primary interest was whether students’ misconceptions were more likely to be corrected if they have higher confidence in those misconceptions. After answering each question, the correct answer was given to the students. After the completion of the survey students were quizzed again to see if they remembered the correct answers to the questions. From these answers, the errors were sorted into high confidence errors – those that students initially answered incorrectly with high confidence, and low confidence errors – those that students initially answered incorrectly with low confidence. The proportion of high-confidence errors corrected (85%) was significantly higher than the proportion of low-confidence errors corrected (61%) in the short answer questions, representing a significant hypercorrection effect (p<.001). However, in the same analysis for the true/false questions, there was no significant difference (p = .61) between the high-confidences errors corrected (68%) and low-confidence errors corrected (71%). These results imply two things: 1) that the type of question asked (short answer versus true/false) may be important in student learning, and 2) when asked to generate an answer, students are more likely to correct high-confidence misconceptions than low-confidence misconceptions.