It's a Matter of Misconceptions

Today I played this video for my Grade 9 Science classes (Academic and Applied):

What was interesting to me was the reaction of the students to the video.

• Students were engaged while watching the video.  They chuckled when somebody in the video couldn't answer what seemed like an easy question and were excited to blurt out the answer when the interviewee couldn't get it
• Students were confident in answering the questions I posed to them after the video.  Maybe seeing others struggle with the same material helped them understand it's perfectly fine to be wrong and there's nothing wrong with taking an educated guess.

Because I saw how well they did with the depth of understanding of the material, I spontaneously asked them why they thought Derek put so many wrong answers in the video.  We had a great discussion about it in both the Academic and Applied classes. 

Here's Derek's own explanation of why he makes videos riddled with people struggling with misconceptions:

Though I didn't show them this video, I had seen it before (and actually read his thesis) and brought up the fact that seeing other people make mistakes can actually lead to a better understanding of the material.  I was impressed with how well the students seemed to understand this.  There was definitely some high level metacognition happening on their part.

Hmmmm... really gets the gears turning.