Refutational text is one of the many instructional techniques that have been proposed to be used in education as a way to achieve effective learning. The aim of refutational text is to transform misconceptions into conceptions that are in line with current scientific concepts. This is done by explicitly stating a misconception, refuting it, and…

The ability to interpret graphs is highly important in modern society, but has proven to be a challenge for many people. In this paper, two teaching methods were used to remediate one specific misinterpretation: the area misinterpretation of box plots. First, we used refutational text to explicitly state and invalidate the area misinterpretation…

Box plots are frequently used, but are often misinterpreted by students. Especially the area of the box in box plots is often misinterpreted as representing number or proportion of observations, while it actually represents their density. In a first study, reaction time evidence was used to test whether heuristic reasoning underlies this…