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

Thu, March 21, 2:15 to 3:45pm, Baltimore Convention Center, Floor: Level 3, Room 344

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

From early in development, children construct intuitive explanatory frameworks around abstract principles and categories that support predictions and inferences about physical and biological phenomena. Despite this, abiding disconnects between contemporary cognitive developmental research and educational practice have meant that early science instruction often remains focused on concrete piecemeal facts rather than causally-integrated, internally consistent “coherent” explanations. This leaves children vulnerable to robust scientific misconceptions given the compelling nature of their intuitive preconceptions and the counterintuitive nature of many scientific explanations, which are often delayed until secondary education.

Challenging conventional wisdom, this symposium demonstrates that early elementary school children benefit from explanatorily coherent mechanistic instruction in the physical, space and evolution sciences. Paper 1 shows that when presented with a physics intervention that scaffolds their abilities to map their perceptual experiences to a counter-perceptual particle model of matter, many kindergartners apply this model to explain material states and phase changes. Paper 2 shows that when third graders receive a space science intervention that directly relates their observations of the day-night cycle to an accurate counterintuitive model of the Earth’s location and axial rotation, children with low prior knowledge show particularly enduring causal-explanatory benefits. Paper 3 shows that when second graders receive a storybook intervention providing a coherent mechanistic explanation for the counterintuitive idea that physically discrete species share common ancestry, many children can generalize it to explain the evolution of new species. An eminent expert on conceptual development and theory-based learning will discuss the theoretical and practical implications of the findings.

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