As a teacher you really do not have to study student misconceptions to deal
with them. A recent article in AJP that I previously referenced shed some
light on teaching. It showed that professors show used a research based
method got identically good results, and those who used the conventional
lecture method also got identically low results. It did not matter who the
professor was, or whether they were new or seasoned, knowledgeable about the
research or not. What they did in class was all that mattered.
This indicates that teaching can be a craft like engineering or medicine.
All you need to know is what to do and how to do it. Teachers do not have
to be researchers in the education field, they just have to be trained in
what to do. Of course there is a minimum competency required, but it may
not even be at the batchelors level of expertise in a subject matter. It
turns out that there are also researchers that have shown that teachers can
be trained to have good class management, but usually this is done by
teaching about class management. So just like MDs teachers can be trained
in the craft.
But the evidence for this was already around from the early '90s. Hestenes
did a similar study with a smaller number of instructors, and Hake's survey
also indicated the same thing. But the AJP article did it with a much
larger number of instructors. There was also a study of Real Time Physics
which showed that it worked even with instructors who did not understand
it's pedagogical philosophy.