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The word "misconceptions"
implies to me that a person's thoughts are "sick" and require "cure",
and denigrates the profound importance of students' initial conceptual
states.
Emergent research in science and mathematics teaching suggests
that if we want to radically improve instructional outcomes, we must
elicit student's ideas and accommodate them in our instruction, and we
can't do this for something we don't respect.
I prefer to avoid the word "misconceptions", and attach a certain
suspicion to the insights of those who use the word freely. The
phrases "learner thought" or "student thought" and "student ideas"
usually suffice.
If we're
continually learning better models of physics, then we may never know
(or teach) anything but "misconceptions".