Harlow paper

I thought the concept of p-prims was very interesting. It's a foreign word to me, but based on my understanding p-prims involve individual interpretation by students on certain phenomenon that may make much sense to themselves, but are in fact wrong. It's very similar to misconceptions, and I think it is one of the main purposes or means of effective science education is identifying and dispelling such misconceptions. Often we can do that through modeling, the types of which depending on the context. It also ties in with the authors' contention that student input should also be considered when formulating instructional sequence. Perhaps we can identify such p-prims early if we engage students in curriculum design. The authors maintain that students are creative thinkers, and it is the teacher's job to elicit that response through the use of modeling, of which there involves multiple revisions based on new understanding and data. I thought the idea that teachers should serve a guide to help students navigate through their own understanding and interpretation was telling. Another thing I liked about the paper was the focus on learning-about-learning, which would greatly help teacher effectiveness by unlearning old pedagogical methods we went through when we were students, and learning better instructional methods that we should use for science education.