The teacher needs to know the truth in the textbook, so as not to get confused by the students.

The teacher learns from many years of experience what the common (and uncommon) misconceptions are.

The teacher knows from a little Web research, what the common misconceptions are out there.

The teacher has developed a critical faculty to see through weird ideas from students.

The teacher has a logical mind to see at which step the student commits the faulty logic or assumption.

Because you gave us a good set of keyphrases, I will help you with a good  reading list.

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=preconceived+notions%2C+non+scientific+beliefs%2C+conceptual+misunderstanding%2C+vernacular+misconceptions%2C+blind+beliefs%2C+or+na%C3%AFve+concepts

Respected Ian Kennedy

Thank you very much for your valuable information and kind support.

Best regards

Rajendra Chavan

I think it would first be very important that the teacher is able to understand the difference between a "misconception" and where the perspective or view of the student is not congruent with those of the teacher. Not sharing my view as your teacher is not "a misconception". This will vary considerably with respect to the epistemic domain in which the teacher is working. For example in the fields of the physical sciences the separation of culture and knowledge is (arguably) easier. If I am teaching about ethics the notion of a misconception is less easily grasped and differentiated from a cultural difference.

We perhaps need to develop the capacity in some teachers to recognise that different learners may have different "world views" that themselves. As such an important quality to develop in teachers is cultural awareness and reflexivity.

If we are looking at the idea of misconceptions as internal inconsistencies within the learners understanding the most valuable skills of the teacher become:

Humility and understanding - leading the learner to question and resolve the internal inconsistencies they are grappling with.

Cultural awareness - realising where the "inconsistencies"  are rooted in clashes between cultural domains. Many learners are now torn between conflicting cultures as they become "global" citizens.

gnothi seauton - if we see ourselves as the centre of an unquestioned "truth" then teaching simply becomes moving learners into our particular framework of understanding. Teaching might, instead be moving the learner FROM a point of certainty to a point of uncertainty.

Formative assessment might be in order. It is simple, time-efficient and will help you identify so called 'misconceptions'.

Having taught a particularly difficult lesson, have your students answer a few yes-or-no questions on said problems. That way, you are able to find out whether they have understood the key concepts.

Simple. Let us first understand that the learner or student has every right to believe what he heard or knew already about any thing. The belief is a part of his culture. The term misconception we are using if it is not coinciding with our view. If the conceived notion is wrong, one can take initiatives to update with the relevant information and throw light on the real aspect of such aspects. Most of the time the information communicated is not passed on correctly, or not reached correctly, it may result in misunderstanding and the person may contradict the views. In such cases it is meaningless to say that he has misconceptions over the views what we have communicated. Most of the time it is a misconception of the person who failed to understand the other person. 

Prof CR

In physics and other sciences, we use concept inventories like the Force Concept Inventory(FCI) to recognize and categorize the misconceptions.

Teacher questioning is the key skill: Teacher needs to be aware of the common misconceptions and alternative conceptions associated with the age of the learners (eg 5 year olds understanding compared to a 12 year olds understanding of shadows would have different degrees of acceptability) and the subject area. The teacher's use of questioning needs to explore the reasoning behind the learners answer eg What makes you say that? Is that always the case?

As the teacher is already aware of the common areas of confusion and misunderstanding and knows the common answers 'confused ' learners might say - they need to anticipate these by having an example that would make the learner re-think and discuss their understanding alongside this 'challenge' and 'argue' through their point which will expose the point where the confusion lies or it will be a light bulb moment where the learners suddenly thinks ahah that's not going to work!! Eg How might you explain x then?  Creating a bank of questions or physical demonstrations that can be drawn on to help students see the mismatch  in their understanding and what is usually seen as the accepted answer, has been termed 'hinge-point' question and works well with older students in secondary schoolin ( but not younger children). In younger ages and older ages, drawing on assessment for learning strategies of questioning and cartoons can be found in the series 'inside the Black Box AFL books (GLAssessment) eg 'Inside the Primary Black Box'  'Science inside the black box: Assessment for learning' 'Geography inside the black box' etc

The depth of understanding of misconceptions has been delved into for many years in Physics Education Research through Physics Education Research Groups in most major universities. Huge volumes of Evidence based research.

Thank you Adrian Mee 

Thank you Marcel Grieger for adding your answer

Thank you Ramakrishnan Chinnasamy  for your suggestions

Thank you John Caranci for your information

Thank you Sally Howard  for your suggestion

You have touched on an important area. Every student will enter into a new learning space with different perceptions of reality based on their individual learning journey. Age, gender, culture, social , religious, and other variables feed into that.  If you understand that then you are half way to developing and using strategies to capture and address it. Some will have a better level of alertness (situational awareness) than others and will be able to re-contextualise. Others will need more structured guidance like formative assessments, feedback, reflection. This is important in my area where we use simulation to provide synthetic or authentic learning opportunities- which requires a mature briefing strategy, plus strategic debriefing.  Do some reading about tacit knowledge and social constructivism. There are other education theories that intersect with this area but this is a good start. 

Thank you Irwyn Shepherd for your kind suggestion

Feedback will be a good idea as it will be able to measure students' misconceptions. Based on the feedback, clarifications can be made.

Concept inventories are developed by teams of experts to help identify misconceptions. Special inventories were developed long ago in the disciplines of science such as physics and geology, and a Science Literacy Concept Inventory for the metadiscipline of science was developed and validated by a team of specialists from all the science disciplines. The report on that is available in a biological journal and through Research Gate. The same inventory is also used to measure metacognitive self-assessment skills of college students. It's available through the current issue of the Scholar Commons journal, Numeracy.

In helping students to understand misconceptions, it is helpful for their first learning "What is a concept?" as opposed to learning just content facts and skills. Then, it is essential that students understand how we acquire misconceptions. Neither of these two awarenesses comes from learning biology content, but both are essential to effectively learn any discipline.

Hi Rajendra Chavan,

The best procedure is to development and to apply simples test in your student. A greater examples (in physic is the article of the Laurence Viennot (you can find it in Researchgate - digit the name in search field of RG - she is a member of community).

Best reagards

Dirceu

A teacher may show students that she or he understands students'  perspective and feelings before changing their misconceptions. Based on the emotional intelligence construct,  teachers need to have an ability to understand emotions of their students because misconceptions can be driven by emotionally colored attitudes and beliefs.

From an eminently humanist perspective it is possible to identify the misconceptions from the constructivist model itself, which allows us to first consider the perspective of the student and, as a function of this, the scientifically supported proposal is presented to the student. Build a new perspective based on the empirical.

This is very important since it is not possible to devalue the previous experience of the student, since it is on the basis of this that it has been possible to build resources to meet their demands both academic and social.

Hi.

1. A teacher should clearly identify the goals, objectives and the requirements of the course at the beginning. If this be done, it can prevent many misconceptions; 

2. A teacher should be aware of the students' background and predict some misconceptions and explicitly talk about them in the class. 

I must agree with all those colleagues who emphasized the need of clarification where the misconception is coming from. What we may see as a misconception can simply be another interpretation of reality.

I believe that the teacher need to be open to any conceptions and find their background / origin (as if it is cultural, religious, age related, etc.). After that with leading questions the teacher can support the student himself/herself to realize the fact of misconception, and the source of it (if it really exists). Giving a chance to a child to explain his/her thinking and support his/her opinion with evidences may give enough time and place for correction and knowledge construction. I support students discovery and constructive learning as that is more effective and convincing than 'forced' acceptance of any fact or idea of the teacher.

Cognitive skill is the most important one needed for a teacher to work in a learning environment and also help in using problem solving techniques 

How Do I Get My Students Over Their Alternative Conceptions (Misconceptions) for Learning? Removing barriers to aid in the development of the student, Joan Lucariello

It is not directly answering the question but offers strategies to deconstruct/work uppon misconceptions.

http://www.apa.org/education/k12/misconceptions.aspx

 Hello Rajendra

Thank you for opening up this interesting strand.

Interestingly, in England, a past version of the teaching standards which all beginning teachers had to meet and demonstrate included a requirement to demonstrate that they were 'able to respond fully and correctly to pupils' typical questions and misconceptions' (DfEE,(1998). Circular 4/98, Teaching: High Status: High Standards, London: Teacher Training Agency).

This of course raised the under-researched question of what these 'misconceptions' might be. The responsible agency thus pulled together a document to flesh out interpretive guidelines for what the Standards might mean [TTA (2001). Handbook to accompany the Standards for the Award of Qualified Teacher Status and Requirements for the Provision of Initial Teacher Training, London: Teacher Training Agency]

The paper had a go at identifying common primary students misconceptions in English and Mathematics...

English (p.22): Beginning teachers should: "Know the significant areas where children tend to make mistakes and where teaching should be particularly systematic and supportive, e.g. b/d confusion in both/either reading or writing; incorrect mapping between phonemes and graphemes in spelling words (e.g. too many - nyoow for new; wrong choice - streem for stream; mispronunciation - wiv for with)"

[I guess that there/their is a pretty regular confusion, too!]

Mathematics (p.25): Beginning teachers can:

"Recognise common pupil errors and misconceptions in mathematics, and understand how these arise, how they can be prevented, and how to remedy them (e.g. counting on 3 from 7 to get 9 as a result of starting with 7; reading 206 as 26 as a result of misunderstanding place value; reading 3-7 as '3 from 7' and getting the answer 4; lining up columns of numbers for operations against a left or right hand margin irrespective of the position of the decimal point; thinking that numbers are larger if there are more decimal digits; stating that two identical angles are unequal because the length of the arms differ; calling a square in a different orientation a diamond; misreading the scale on a ruler, starting at 1, rather than 0; not using the scale when interpreting a graph, treating the graph as a picture rather than a scaled representation; thinking that, when throwing a die, a 6 is harder to get than other numbers; incorrectly generalising the 'add a nought' rule when multiplying decimals by 10)....

For student misconceptions and mistakes in History a former colleague of mine made a fascinating contribution in an area where there was (certainly at that time) surprisingly little literature....

Huggins, M, ‘History: 1066 And all that! Pupil misconceptions’ in H. Cooper and R Hyland (eds.) Children’s Perceptions of Learning with Trainee Teachers (Routledge 1999) pp.85-93.

This paper still stands up as a thoughtful contribution to the 'misconceptions' literature.

Also: Pendry, A, Atha, J, Carden, S, Courtney, L., Keogh, C. & Ruston, K. (1997). Pupil misconceptions in History. Teaching History 86 p.18-20.

I hope that some of these thoughts help. Best wishes.

    Peter Brett.

In terms of mathematical misconceptions in the classroom, this guide for primary teachers might be useful:

https://uk.sagepub.com/en-gb/eur/mathematical-misconceptions/book232893

Thank you respected Marcel Grieger, Hossein Navidinia, Anita Gedei, Ramakrishnan Chinnasamy, Hector Solatges, Peter Brett, Keith Jones for your informative answers contribution to my research work!

Regards,

Rajendra Chavan

Nice question Rajendra Chavan. Keen observations, by knowing your students well, dedications to your work, devotations, commod on subject knowledge, excellent teaching skills, passion of teaching, experience of dealing with all types of students, giving opportunity to explore their talent through seminar, presentations, group discussions will definetiely helps to identify student's misconcepts.

Scaffolding strategies will be helpful for teacher

Good Contribution Keith Jones