Knowledge is not Enough: Factors That Influence Parental Success When Teaching Their Children Counterintuitive Concepts

• In Event: Parent-Child Conversations as a Mechanism for Cognitive Development

Abstract

Counterintuitive concepts are difficult to teach and learn. The concept of natural selection conflicts with our intuitions that traits develop to serve purposes, that events and phenomena happen by design, and that species do not change. This study examines whether parental understanding of adaptation by natural selection predicts their success in teaching it to their children.

On the one hand, having an accurate understanding of adaptation should allow parents to give their children coherent explanations and refute misconceptions. Alternatively, when asked to teach such a multi-faceted and counterintuitive concept, parents may still struggle to put together the pieces in an accurate, causally-coherent way. By implication, parents who understand adaptation should be better teachers if given opportunities to reflect on their knowledge prior to teaching.

We studied 100 highly educated parents and their 5-to-8-year-old children (63% of parents had a master’s degree or higher). Most parents (62%) possessed an accurate understanding of adaptation by natural selection.

Children’s understanding of adaptation was assessed before and after they talked with their parent. All parents were asked to explain to their children “why many hundreds of years ago most of the wilkies had shorter legs but now most of the wilkies have longer legs” using four pictures depicting the past and current population and an environmental change (Figure 1).

Parents were randomly assigned to one of three teaching conditions: In the No Prime condition, parents were asked to teach their child about adaptation without any preparation. We assessed their understanding of adaptation after they taught their child. In the Prime condition, parents completed an assessment of their understanding of adaptation before being asked to teach their child. In the Storybook condition, prior to being asked to teach their child, parents completed an initial adaptation assessment, heard a custom picture storybook about adaptation by natural selection, and completed a second adaptation assessment.

When parents were not given opportunities to review their prior knowledge prior to talking with their children (No Prime), parents’ understanding of adaptation did not significantly predict whether a child maintained or acquired a selectionist understanding rather than losing or failing to acquire such an understanding, OR = 1.26, p = .74. However, when parents did review their understanding of adaptation prior to teaching (Prime and Storybook combined), parents’ understanding of adaptation was associated with a higher probability that their child maintained or acquired a selectionist understanding of adaptation, OR = 5.93, p = .003. The Prime and Storybook conditions did not differ (Figure 2). Child age wasn’t a predictor.

In sum, contrary to assumptions that having highly schooled or knowledgeable parents automatically confers learning advantages on children, these results suggest that when teaching a highly counterintuitive concept (i.e. natural selection), parental prior knowledge is not enough. Parent knowledge only predicted child learning when parents were able to recall and organize their own knowledge prior to teaching. Ongoing analyses of the parent-child conversations will confirm whether children in the No Prime condition received less coherent explanations or pedagogy than children in other conditions.

Authors

• Samuel Ronfard, University of Toronto
  Presenting Author

• Deb Kelemen, Boston University
  Non-Presenting Author