Explanatory Capacities in Early Elementary School: Can Children Learn the Counterintuitive Concept of Speciation?

• In Event: 1-143 - Children’s understanding of counterintuitive scientific concepts: The role of coherent explanation-based instruction

Integrative Statement

Intuitive explanatory frameworks are useful in everyday reasoning but can be obstacles to formal science learning. This is because they often involve categories and causal assumptions at odds with those of scientific theories, yielding enduring misconceptions about unifying but counterintuitive scientific mechanisms. One scientific process that is particularly susceptible to misinterpretation is speciation by natural selection, the mechanism by which new species evolve.

Speciation conflicts with lay explanatory frameworks rooted in essentialist intuitions that species are fixed and invariant, and teleological intuitions that evolution transforms organisms for a purpose. Because such intuitions arise early in development, one educational proposal draws on theory theory and dual processing theory to argue that we should scaffold a coherent mechanistic understanding of speciation from early on. However, assumptions about the cognitive limitations of elementary school children have meant that instruction has focused on piecemeal macro-evolutionary facts (e.g. fossils). This study explored whether 7-to-8-year-old children can learn and generalize an understanding of speciation, long before they are usually taught it in high school. In the process, it examined the contested viability (e.g. Southerland & Nadelson, 2012) of a learning progression on natural selection that builds from adaptation to speciation.

Our earlier studies found that 7-to-8-year-old children can enduringly learn and generalize the causally complex theory of adaptation by natural selection after hearing a coherent custom picture storybook about a novel species called pilosas. We therefore designed a new storybook that extended the pilosas’ story. It explained how geographical isolation and selection on multiple traits led them to evolve into the physically dissimilar “miroungas.” Urban second graders (N=18) heard the original adaptation storybook and the new speciation storybook in a five-session sequence that supported children’s mapping of smaller scale within-species adaptation to larger scale between-species speciation. Book-readings were interspersed with talk-aloud assessments that required children to explain adaptation and speciation, applying them to novel scenarios immediately and after 3 months.

Results from the pre-to post-test design (Figure 1) revealed that children not only understood and generalized adaptation, Wald χ2(1)=21.73,p<0.001, but speciation too, Wald χ2(1)=17.74, p<0.001. Despite 95% of children displaying little knowledge at pretest, 67% of children generalized a selectionist account of speciation at immediate posttest. This effect did not persist three months later. Current work is exploring factors that support delayed generalization.

In conclusion, young children are able to learn and abstract coherent mechanistic explanations of causally complex processes. This sheds light on children’s explanatory capacities. It also has implications for early science education on pivotal counterintuitive concepts. Traditional theories of conceptual change posit the successive revision-and-replacement of explanatory theories (e.g. Carey, 1985; Gopnik & Wellman, 1996), yet current evidence suggests that intuitively-based frameworks often persistently coexist alongside formally learned theories (e.g. Evans, Legare & Rosengren, 2011; Kelemen & Rosset, 2009; Shtulman, 2017). Thus, interventions that progressively revisit counterintuitive mechanisms from earlier in development, before misconceptions deeply entrench, promise to enhance both initial learning and longer-term online reasoning. Specifically, robust representations constructed during earlier time-points may reduce susceptibility to interference from coexistent intuitions later on.

Authors

• Samuel Ronfard, Boston University
  Presenting Author

• Erin Doncaster, Boston University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Deborah Kelemen, Boston University
  Non-Presenting Author