Children's Misconceptions: Opinions and Practices of Preschool Teachers

This study investigated preschool teachers' perceptions of common misconceptions among 4- to 6-year-olds and their strategies for addressing these misconceptions. For this purpose, the study adopted phenomenology design. The participants consisted of a total of 122 preschool teachers selected via snowball (n=122) and criterion (n=24) sampling. A total of 122 participants completed the structured survey, and 24 participants participated in the semi-structured interview. Percentage and frequency were used in the analysis of data collected through structured survey. Descriptive and content analysis were used to analyze the data collected with the semi-structured interview form. The findings indicated that the concepts in which children made the most misconceptions were about yesterday-today-tomorrow, right-left, on someone's right-on someone's left, deep-shallow, ellipse, before-now-after, circle, number of rankings, edge, morning-noon-evening, corner, rectangle, glossy-matte, first-middle-last, numbers between 1 and 20, and odd-even. The majority of teachers evaluated children's readiness to detect their misconceptions. Children made misconceptions by mixing similar concepts, making semantic errors, making linguistic problems and making generalizations. The main sources of misconceptions in children were the family, the child (level of cognitive deficit), the nature of the concept, excessive use of digital tools and the educator. The research recommends that preschool teachers receive in-service training to use different methods and techniques to detect and correct misconceptions.