| Abstract: | Refutation texts facilitate knowledge revision by placing science misconceptions in the foreground. However, in some situations, repeating incorrect information can work against the desired goal of correcting misconceptions, or can spread misinformation to new audiences. Thus, our goal was to examine whether merely implying the existence of a misconception, without explicitly stating the incorrect information, is sufficient to facilitate knowledge revision from a text. Undergraduate participants who expressed a common physics misconception read one of three passages about the issue, including a correct explanation of the situation. The passages differed in whether the refutation of the misconception was explicitly stated, implied by a warning phrase, or not referred to at all. We found that participants were less likely to express the misconception when they were questioned about the topic after reading the passage with the explicit refutation or with the warning phrase. Furthermore, the current results indicate that refutations of misconceptions can influence knowledge revision in ways that extended beyond the details of the original learning episode, even when they are only implied by a warning phrase. However, it remains unclear whether implied refutations of misconceptions can endure across a delay in time. These findings have potential implications for optimizing science texts to effectively address misconceptions. |
