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Poster #32 - Relations between Intuitive Thinking and Evolutionary Understanding in 8th Graders and Undergraduates

Sat, March 23, 2:30 to 3:45pm, Baltimore Convention Center, Floor: Level 1, Exhibit Hall B

Integrative Statement

Background. Students tend to think about biological concepts, entities, and processes in intuitive ways, known as cognitive construals, that lead to misconceptions in learning science. For example, essentialist thinking, teleological thinking, and anthropocentric thinking have been shown to impede the understanding of evolutionary biology. We extend this work by examining relations between construal-based thinking and evolution understanding in early and late adolescence and assessing changes after an academic unit on evolution. To do so, we analyzed explanations for evolutionary scenarios provided by 8th grade and undergraduate science students. Our primary research questions were (1) What is the prevalence of construal-based thinking and evolutionary understanding in explanations for evolutionary scenarios among 8th grade and undergraduate science students? (2) How are construal-based thinking and evolutionary understanding related in 8th grade and undergraduate science students?

Method. A total of 572 participants took part in the study. Eighth graders (N=312) were tested in their science classrooms. Undergraduate students (N=260) enrolled in an introductory biology course for non-majors participated as part of a class assignment. Participants were presented with scenarios asking for explanations of how blind salamanders evolved from sighted ancestors who could see, how penguins evolved from ancestors who could fly, how cheetahs evolved from slower ancestors, and how a moth species changed color during the Industrial Revolution. Eighth graders provided written responses to four prompts, and undergraduates completed three.

Results. Responses were coded by 5 independent coders for the presence of (a) cognitive construals, and (b) components of evolutionary understanding.
Prevalence of Cognitive Construals and Evolutionary Understanding. Across scenarios, essentialist thinking was most commonly used (54% of all responses), followed by teleological thinking (31%) and anthropocentric thinking (15%). This pattern held for both 8th graders and undergraduates. Overall, undergraduates showed more evolutionary understanding (43.9% of responses show some evidence thereof) than 8th graders (17.4%). This held across all three common scenarios.
Relations Between Cognitive Construals and Evolutionary Understanding. When aggregated across scenarios, relations between the presence of cognitive construals and demonstration of evolutionary understanding was virtually identical for 8th graders and undergraduates (Fig. 1). For both groups, presence of anthropocentric language in written explanations was unrelated to presence of elements of evolutionary understanding. In contrast, presence of teleological language was associated with less evolutionary understanding, and presence of essentialist language was associated with more evolutionary understanding.

Discussion. As expected, intuitive thinking was evident across all scenarios for both 8th graders and undergraduates. Moreover, presence of cognitive construals was related to evolutionary understanding in consistent albeit somewhat unexpected ways. Specifically, teleological thinking was negatively associated with evolutionary knowledge for both 8th graders and undergraduates, whereas essentialist beliefs were positively related to evolutionary knowledge for both groups. This suggests that while some types of intuitive biological thinking may interfere with learning scientific concepts, others may provide important scaffolding for learners as they acquire scientific expertise.

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