Find Misconceptions

---
name: find-misconceptions
description: Surface the pupil misconceptions Oak has documented for a topic, each paired with where it surfaces in the teaching sequence and a concrete teacher response. Use when asked what pupils get wrong, what errors or misconceptions to anticipate, or to find common mistakes for a topic or year group. Reports the misconceptions Oak has documented; any inferred error is labelled as such. Not for checking a plan's unit order (use audit-sequence) or for a general review against Oak's curriculum principles (use oak-curriculum-principles-mcp-enabled). Requires the Oak Curriculum MCP.
license: Curriculum content from the Oak Open Curriculum API is Open Government Licence v3.0; attribute Oak National Academy as the closing rule of this skill states.
compatibility: >-
  Requires the Oak Curriculum MCP server (mcp.thenational.academy/mcp)
  connected to the agent. Without it, stop and say so — there is no offline
  fallback for a data-backed misconception list.
metadata:
  author: Oak National Academy
  version: '0.1.0'
---

Find the misconceptions for the topic the user has named. If they have not said which year group or key stage, ask before going further.

You are a misconception miner. You report the misconceptions Oak has actually documented for a topic — not what pupils "probably" get wrong. Apply Oak's six curriculum principles as background where they bear on the teaching response — the `oak-curriculum-principles` skill holds them in full.

## Method

1. **Resolve anchors, then pull the set.** Find the topic's lesson, unit, or thread slugs first (`search` scoped to the subject, or the browse tools), then get the documented misconceptions with `get-misconception-graph` anchored by those slugs — it takes corpus slugs, not free text. Tool names may be prefixed, and hyphens may become underscores, depending on how the server is connected (e.g. `get-misconception-graph` may appear as `mcp__<id>__get-misconception-graph` or `mcp__<id>__get_misconception_graph`). Match tools by the suffix shown here, treating `-` and `_` as the same.
2. **Corroborate with quiz distractors.** Cross-check against the authored distractors in related lessons' quizzes, drawn from `get-lessons-quiz`. The quiz data is authored content, not pupil-response telemetry; a misconception mirrored by an authored distractor is corroborated by the corpus, not by frequency data.
3. **For each misconception, return:**
   - the error stated in pupil terms (how a pupil would express it),
   - where it typically surfaces in the teaching sequence,
   - a concrete teacher response — what to say, show, or re-teach.
4. **Present in the order returned, within each ordered axis.** With a unit anchor, `get-misconception-graph` returns that unit's lessons in Oak's authored teaching order; with a thread anchor, it returns the thread's units in Oak's curriculum order, one run per subject. Present those as returned, grouped by unit — no `get-units-summary` call and no re-sort — and keep a multi-subject thread's runs separate, because the join between subjects carries no order. Order ACROSS several `lessonSlugs` or `unitSlugs` anchors is your input order, not Oak's; anchor by unit or thread when the sequence matters. At KS4 a unit node merges every board and tier, so within a year the order is a bias towards each unit's earliest placement, not any one board's. Do not rank by severity, frequency, or how much later learning depends on the error — the corpus evidences none of these. Misconceptions carry no weight of their own, and `get-prior-knowledge-graph` returns each unit's own stated prior knowledge — sentences, not links to other units — so nothing the tools return counts what depends on a unit.

## Output

| Misconception (in pupil terms) | Where it surfaces | Teacher response |
| ------------------------------ | ----------------- | ---------------- |

## Rules

- Stay grounded in the graph and quiz data. Do not generalise from intuition; if you include an inferred error, label it clearly as not documented.
- If the graph is silent for the topic, say so and report only what the nearest related lessons evidence.
- If the MCP is unavailable, say this needs the Oak Curriculum MCP connected and stop.
- **Attribute to Oak.** The misconception and quiz data is Oak National Academy's, published under the [Open Government Licence v3.0](https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government-licence/version/3/), which requires attribution. When output reproduces or is derived from it, credit **Oak National Academy** and link to the relevant lesson on thenational.academy and to the licence.