Deborah A. Kelemen - US grants

As biotechnology and medical research become ever more relevant to this nation's economic and physical well being, the importance of well conceived and carefully designed scientific curricula has never been greater. In that context, this project concerns the nature of - and appropriate pedagogical response to - a pattern of thought that is, on the one hand, prerequisite to the development of scientific literacy but that, on the other hand, can be profoundly deleterious to the elaboration of a true scientific understanding of biological processes.

Teleo-functional reasoning explains entities and events in terms of the purposes that they serve. It is foundational to literacy in the life sciences because it distinguishes western schooled adults' conceptions of biological versus non-biological natural phenomena: While adults view entities such as nostrils as existing "for" particular functions (e.g., breathing), they tend to view entities such as caves as purposeless even though they perform many activities (e.g., producing stalagmites). However, despite their centrality to drawing a basic scientific distinction, most non-experts' specific ideas about function are an obstacle to biological understanding. This is because they are motivated by a mistaken view of natural selection as a goal-directed process akin to intentional design rather than as a blind mechanism. Understanding the origins of this scientific misconstrual, and designing effective curricular materials to counter it as early as possible, is therefore crucial to the promotion of lifelong literacy and learning in biology.

To that end, the goal of this research is to empirically explore the nature of young children's teleo-functional intuitions as they enter the formative years of their scientific schooling, and to use this empirical foundation as the basis for an innovative, exploratory educational intervention to teach 5- to 8-year-old children natural selection. This emphasis occurs in response to several recent findings indicating the need for such work. First, current studies suggest that until well into elementary school, children appear to construe all kinds of living and non-living entities - clocks, lions, ponds, mountains, clouds and their properties - as existing for a purpose (DiYanni & Kelemen, 2005a; Kelemen, 1999ab, 2003; but see Keil, 1992). In consequence, unlike adults, pre- and elementary school children do not seem to differentiate living from non-living natural phenomena along teleo-functional lines. Second, research also suggests that young children's purpose-based attributions are motivated by intuitions that natural phenomena are products of intentional design (Piaget, 1929; Evans, 2000a, 2001; Kelemen, 2004). As a result, young children therefore already show the hallmarks of reasoning patterns recognized as persistent impediments to a scientific understanding of biology.

In exploring possible reasons why children possess such intuitions plus potential instructional responses to these ideas, this research is intended as the initial step in a larger research program that, in partnership with early childhood educators, and an expert international advisory panel of inter-disciplinary researchers, seeks to directly apply methods and insights from cognitive developmental research to the design of innovative and empirically informed early scientific instruction.

The goal of this research project is to design classroom-level interventions that will guide students toward a basic understanding of biological adaptation through natural selection using picture books as pedagogical tools of instruction. The proposer engages support from experts in related fields to help develop "tailor-made" picture books to convey complex scientific information to 400 kindergarten through second grade (K-2) students in 32 schools in the Worcester Public School District.

The questions for the study include: (1) whether it is possible to foster a scientifically accurate and productive understanding of adaptation by natural selection in Grades K-2 classrooms using picture storybooks; (2) what the most effective components of such a classroom intervention are; (3) whether complex biological concepts are more accurately learned by young children when explanations are couched in terms of human or in terms of non-human animals; and (4) whether early instruction about the mechanism of natural selection modifies young children's untutored tendency to explain natural entities by reference to function, a teleological bias is at the heart of older students' scientifically inaccurate reasoning.

Building on a NSF-supported pilot study, this research will consist of four individual studies, each building on lessons-learned from the one before. The first three studies will include a pre-test, intervention, immediate, and delayed post-test design to explore individual-level changes in grade K-2 students' learning and generalization about the logic of natural selection. Study four will be a classroom-level intervention whose structure depends on wisdom accumulated from the first three studies. It will involve picture book reading sessions with small groups of children followed by assessments of their learning. These sequential studies will be administered orally by the proposer.

The ECR (Education and Human Resources Core Research) program emphasizes fundamental STEM education research that will generate foundational knowledge in the field. Research shows that world-wide, despite its importance to the life sciences, natural selection remains one of the most widely misunderstood processes in biology. Specifically, studies reveal that scientific misconceptions about natural selection not only persist among high school students and undergraduates who are usual targets of instruction on evolution by natural selection, but, disturbingly, also among many of the teachers trained to teach them. Research further reveals that the origin of many of these misconceptions can be traced to intuitive cognitive biases found at the elementary school level. This project will address this problem by building and testing a learning sequence on natural selection at the early elementary grades before intuitive theoretical misconceptions are likely to have become entrenched. This effort will expand existing infrastructure for research and education currently supported through a university, to school partnership involving elementary educators, curriculum developers, professional development providers, interdisciplinary academic researchers and cognitive development expert consultants.

The project focuses on understanding whether the proposed natural selection learning sequence is even viable and beneficial for elementary school students and teachers given children's representational constraints, the development and entrenchment of intuitive cognitive biases and teacher science anxiety. The two central aims will be to: (1) develop the core architecture and explore the feasibility of an expanded elementary school learning sequence on natural selection; (2) examine the educative professional development benefits to elementary school teachers of the developed story-based intervention materials. Six interventions will be conducted through an iteratively designed series of laboratory, afterschool, or classroom empirical studies to explore the viability of mechanistically teaching K-2 children about within- and between-species adaptation by natural selection. Due to the non-binary nature of data that will be generated by the studies, core analyses will be repeated measures ordinal logistic regressions with chi-squared tests for significance. Effect sizes will be indexed by odds ratio. Results from this work will advance scientific knowledge and educational practice by yielding insights about children?s capacities as explanatory thinkers and theory-builders. Materials and products (storybooks, animations and assessment tools) will directly benefit schools, teachers, children and parents in the State of Massachusetts and nationally.

Natural selection is a fundamental mechanism of evolution, the unifying principle of biology. It is central to understanding the functional specialization of living things, the origin of species diversity and the inherent unity of biological life. Despite the early emergence of tendencies that can make evolution increasingly challenging to learn over time, natural selection is currently not taught until middle or high school. This is long after patterns of misunderstanding are likely to have become more entrenched. The current research responds to this situation. It targets elementary school as the time to initiate comprehensive instruction on biological evolution. Adopting a teaching and curricular approach that will be novel in its integration of custom explanatory storybook materials with hands-on investigations, it seeks to promote third grade students? understanding of small- and large-scale evolution by natural selection. By studying students across multiple school districts, this research will shed light on the benefits to diverse students of instruction that focuses on supporting children?s capacities to cogently explain aspects of the biological world rather than learn disparate facts about it. It will also illuminate the value of simple tools, like explanatory storybooks, for elementary school teachers who are often expected to teach counterintuitive topics such as natural selection while not feeling confident in their own understanding.

This project will investigate changes in Grade 3 students? learning and reasoning about living things during implementation of a guided inquiry curriculum unit on evolution by natural selection that emphasizes causal-mechanistic explanation. Classroom inquiry activities and investigations into a range of real-world phenomena will be framed by engagement with a sequence of innovative custom causal-explanatory storybook, animation and writing prompt materials that were developed under prior NSF support to promote transferable, scientifically accurate theory- and evidence-based reasoning about natural selection. In response to the distinctive challenges of life science and evolution learning, the project will integrate and thematically unify currently disparate Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) content and practice standards to create a comprehensive unit that addresses all three NGSS dimensions and is accompanied by evidence-based approaches to teacher professional development (PD). Using a design based research approach, and informed by cognitive developmental findings, this 4-year project will engage at least 700 students and their teachers and include partners from at least four school districts, Boston University, and TERC.

The Discovery Research K-12 program (DRK-12) seeks to significantly enhance the learning and teaching of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) by preK-12 students and teachers, through research and development of innovative resources, models, and tools. Projects in the DRK-12 program build on fundamental research in STEM education and prior research and development efforts that provide theoretical and empirical justification for proposed projects.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

Misconceptions about the transmission of COVID-19 can lead to noncompliance with preventive public health recommendations. The first goal of this project, led by researchers at Boston University and Northeastern University, is to understand the deeper conceptual nature of these biological misconceptions. The research will explore whether these ideas are specific to COVID-19 or whether they reflect intuitive reasoning patterns of reasoning about biological phenomena more generally, and how prevalent they are in early elementary school children. A further focus of this research will be on caregivers and teachers?adults who are important sources of information to children. Prior NSF-funded research has shown that misconceptions about biological phenomena emerge early in development and can become entrenched. Therefore, the second major goal of this research is the rapid design and testing of a pilot educational intervention that addresses children?s and adults? reasoning about COVID-19 and also incorporates more general information about the causal mechanisms that underlie biological contagion. The intervention will be modeled on earlier interventions by the investigators that used animated narratives to teach complex biological concepts successfully to children and adults. This RAPID award is made by the EHR Core Research (ECR) program in DRL, using funds from the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act. ECR supports work that advances the fundamental research literature on STEM learning.

Humans possess powerful intuitive explanatory and inferential tendencies that provide fast and efficient ? but sometimes fallible ? guidelines for making sense of complex phenomena in the biological world. Prior NSF-funded work has shown how these tendencies?for example, intuitive teleological, essentialist, and anthropocentric modes of reasoning?emerge early and act as filters on the learning of biological information at all ages. Sometimes these intuitions are consistent with formal biological reasoning and can be leveraged in the classroom to support learning, but sometimes they are not and lead to systematic and entrenched biological misconceptions across development. Information about COVID-19 is no exception. In this project, the researchers will: (1) investigate intuitive reasoning about the causal mechanisms of COVID-19 transmission and infection?along with reasoning about illness more generally?among teachers and caregivers of 1st - 2nd grade students; (2) conduct parallel investigations with the 1st - 2nd grade students themselves; and (3) rapidly design and pilot test a cognitively-informed educational intervention on COVID-19, and related illnesses, for elementary children, caregivers, and teachers based on the evidence that will be gleaned from these investigations. In order to understand the influence on children of adults? reasoning about COVID-19?and disease more generally?this project will develop child and adult versions of a survey instrument consisting of: (a) an open-ended interview on the causality, treatment, and prevention of COVID-19; (b) a risky behavior detection task to assess knowledge and beliefs about the risks of common behaviors; (c) a causal knowledge assessment that asks more generally about the mechanisms of illness transmission and infection. These measures will be administered via online research. Insights gained from these measures will be quickly used to develop a pilot intervention that will use an animated narrative video to supported children's and adults? mechanistic understanding of COVID-19 and related disease transmission and prevention. Pre- and post-testing will determine the effectiveness of this pilot intervention and lay the foundation for future research and intervention. This research will shed light on children?s and adults? understandings about COVID-19, and the degree to which children?s ideas are shaped by intuitive explanatory tendencies and that misconceptions can be exacerbated by specific misinformation from caregivers and teachers. It will also illuminate cognitively-informed ways to educate adults about complex biological phenomena as a way of addressing misconceptions in the children with whom they interact.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.