The following snippet was taken from an article entitled   as published in the April 2013 edition of the Harvard Gazette.  

If you had to explain what causes the change in seasons, could you? Surprisingly, studies have shown that as many as 95 percent of people - including most college graduates - hold the incorrect belief that the seasons are the result of the Earth moving closer to or further from the sun.

The real answer, scientists say, is that as Earth's axis is tilted with respect to its orbit, when on its journey it is angled inward, the sun rises higher in the sky, and that results in more direct sunlight, longer days, and warmer temperatures. Distance plays no role; we are actually closest to the sun in the dead of winter, during the first week of January.

Why do so many people continue to hold the wrong idea? "The answer," said Philip Sadler, the Frances W. Wright Senior Lecturer in the Department of Astronomy and director of the science education department at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA), "may be found in what science teachers know."

As part of an unusual study, Sadler and colleagues tested 181 middle school physical science teachers and nearly 10,000 of their students, and showed that while most of the teachers were well-versed in their subject, those better able to predict their students' wrong answers on standardized tests helped students learn the most. 

The findings are described in a paper published last month in the American Educational Research Journal titled "The Influence of Teachers' Knowledge on Student Learning in Middle-School Physical Science Classrooms..."

Read the rest of the article HERE.