Current threats to biodiversity are profound, yet relatively little is systematically known from controlled studies about the factors that promote conservation attitudes, moral concern, and environmentalist behavior in relation to endangered species that are unfamiliar or aversive. In two experiments, we drew on cognitive and develop-mental research to explore the causal influence of scientific naming, and conceptual information about anthropocentric or biocentric functional effects on US urban adults' (Study 1) and 9-to 11-year-old children's (Study 2) attitudes about conserving recently discovered insects. We also explored whether negative emotional reactions outweigh conceptual information about names and functions when predicting conservation concern. In Study 1, scientific labels largely had no effect on urban adults' baseline ambivalence about the importance of conserving unfamiliar arthropods. However, conservation concern was increased by hearing about the insects' functional behavior, particularly anthropocentric functions that benefit humans. Adults' feelings of disgust about the insects negatively predicted conservation attitudes; however, emotions never outweighed conceptual in-formation in predicting adults' attitudes or behavior. Study 2 found that, as with adults, scientific labeling in-formation either had no, or a negative, impact on urban fourth and fifth graders' baseline ambivalence to preserving unknown insects. However, both biocentric and anthropocentric functional information increased concern: Fourth graders were particularly moved by biocentric functions while fifth graders showed a greater anthropocentric bias. Children's emotional reactions were also predictive. Unlike with adults, children's feelings sometimes outweighed effects of conceptual information in predicting conservationist responses. Together, these findings illuminate developmental trajectories in conservation attitudes, especially biocentrism, in urban US children and adults. They also shed light on factors that can be manipulated (e.g., by communication specialists) to provoke conservation concern. Importantly, they clarify the role of words, functions, and feelings in shaping social and moral attitudes.

Background: Storybooks are an effective tool for teaching complex scientific mechanisms to young children when presented in child-friendly, joint-attentional contexts like read-aloud sessions. However, static storybooks are limited in their ability to convey change across time and, relative to animated storybooks, are harder to disseminate to a wide audience. This study examined second graders’ abilities to learn the deeply counterintuitive concepts of adaptation and speciation from multi-day interventions centered around two storybooks about natural selection that were either read-aloud (static) or watched on a screen (animated). The storybook sequence was progressive and first explained—in counter-essentialist and non-teleological terms—how the relative distribution of a terrestrial mammal’s trait changed over time due to behavioral shifts in their primary food resource (adaptation, book 1). It then explained how–after a sub-population of this species became geographically isolated–they evolved into an entirely different aquatic species over many generations via selection on multiple foraging-relevant traits (speciation, book 2). The animated and static versions of the storybooks used the same text and illustrations, but while the animations lacked joint-attentional context, they more dynamically depicted successive reproductive generations. Storybook and animation presentations were interspersed with five parallel talk-aloud assessment interviews over three days. Results: Findings revealed substantial learning from the read-aloud static storybook sequence. They also revealed substantial learning from the animation condition with patterns suggesting that the dynamic representations of change over time particularly scaffolded acquisition of the deeply counterintuitive idea that a species can evolve into an entirely different category of species by natural selection. Conclusions: The results provide much-needed optimism in a context of increasing demands for scalable solutions to promote effective learning: animated storybooks are just as good (and may even be better) than static storybooks. © 2023, The Author(s).

Acquiring the counterintuitive logic of how the mechanism of natural selection (NS) leads to the evolution of new species (speciation) represents a paradigm case of conceptual change. Given this, we examined children's intuitive preconceptions about speciation and their ability to construct, generalize, and retain an accurate understanding of the theory. We did so by conducting two multi-age, multi-session, and multi-measure intervention studies that assessed children's understanding of natural selection 4 times over three months using extended interviews. We also examined the role of Executive Function skills (EF) in these conceptual change processes. Distinctively, we explored whether-consistent with conceptual co-existence accounts-EF not only supports children's initial construction of a counterintuitive theory but also plays an ongoing role in the online reasoning of successful learners. Across two studies, North American children in Grades 2 (N = 34) and 3 (N = 34) were provided with coherent mechanistic explanations of NS through a two-storybook intervention sequence. The first storybook described the logic of NS to explain how a specialized body part evolved within a fictional species (adaptation). The second storybook extended the logic to explain how this same species evolved into a new, distinct species (speciation). Findings revealed that many second and third graders were able to learn and generalize the logic of speciation. This is a remarkable feat given that speciation conflicts with early developing essentialist and teleological intuitions, and defeats most adults. Our analyses also confirmed that constructing this counterintuitive theory draws heavily on children's EF capacities. They additionally reveal that once the theory is constructed, EF plays a continuing role in reasoning by inhibiting competing intuitive explanations that co-exist rather than being replaced during the process of conceptual change.

Background: Despite the importance of understanding the mechanism of natural selection for both academic success and everyday decision-making, this concept is one of the most challenging to learn in contemporary science. In addition to cumulative socio-cultural influences, intuitive cognitive biases such as the teleological bias - the early developing tendency to explain phenomena in terms of function or purpose - contribute to the difficulty of accurate learning when the process is taught in high school or later. In this work, we therefore investigate - for the first time - the viability of a teacher-led classroom-based storybook intervention for teaching natural selection in early elementary school. The intervention was designed to counteract teleological explanations of adaptation. In consequence, we specifically examined the nature and extent of elementary school children's teleological reasoning about biological trait change before and after this intervention. Results: Second and third grade students demonstrated a variety of misunderstandings at pretest, including teleological preconceptions. Most of these teleological ideas were explicitly accompanied by incorrect mechanistic ideas, confirming that the teleological reasoning observed in this young sample reflected fundamental misunderstandings of adaptation as a goal-directed event. Overall, learning from the classroom intervention was substantial, with students performing significantly better on all measures of natural selection understanding at posttest. Interestingly, explicit teleological reasoning displayed at the pretest did not have a differentially greater impact on learning than other kinds of marked pretest misunderstandings. One explanation for this might be that children displaying teleological misunderstandings at pretest also tended to demonstrate more biological factual knowledge than other students. Another explanation might be that pretest misunderstandings that were not overtly teleological were, nevertheless, implicitly teleological due to the nature of the mechanisms that they referenced. The differential impact of teleological preconceptions on learning might therefore have been underestimated. Conclusions: In summary, early elementary school children show substantial abilities to accurately learn natural selection from a limited but scalable classroom-based storybook intervention. While children often display explicit teleological preconceptions, it is unclear whether these ideas represent greater impediments to learning about adaptation than other substantial misunderstandings. Reasons for this, and limitations of the present research, are discussed. © 2020 The Author(s).

Common-sense intuitions can be useful guides in everyday life and problem solving. However, they can also impede formal science learning and provide the basis for robust scientific misconceptions. Addressing such misconceptions has generally been viewed as the province of secondary schooling. However, in this article, I argue that for a set of foundational but highly counterintuitive ideas (e.g., evolution by natural selection), coherent causal-explanatory instruction-instruction that emphasizes the multifaceted mechanisms underpinning natural phenomena-should be initiated much sooner, in early elementary school. This proposal is motivated by various findings from research in the cognitive, developmental, and learning sciences. For example, it has been shown that explanatory biases that render students susceptible to intuitively based scientific misconceptions emerge early in development. Furthermore, findings also reveal that once developed, such misconceptions are not revised and replaced by subsequently learned scientific theories but competitively coexist alongside them. Taken together, this research, along with studies revealing the viability of early coherent explanation-based instruction on counterintuitive theories, have significant implications for the timing, structure, and scope of early science education.