ECR Projects

Explore past and current fundamental STEM education research projects across the three research areas that NSF's EDU Core Research (ECR) program funds, as well as across ECR funding types. Other search filters draw from both NSF's data and the ECR Hub's hand coding of award abstracts.

Ninth-grade biology students create cell models using clay.

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Collaborative Research: Designing an Educational Intervention to Address Intuitive Misconceptions about COVID-19

Effective Years: 2020-2023

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.