SGER: Preliminary Investigations of the Factors Impacting the Acquisition of Evolutionary Concepts

这是一个探索性研究（SGER）的建议，研究儿童的进化的理解收购的小额赠款。建议的主要目的是进行必要的探索性研究，以帮助阐明一个发展框架，了解儿童的早期概念发展和他们的进化概念的收购之间的关系。 这项工作背后的假设是，人们很难掌握某些进化概念，因为这些概念可能与人们关于适应和选择的直觉概念和信念相冲突。进化概念意味着所有物种在某种意义上都是相关的。这挑战了人们认为物种在性质上是不同的直觉偏见。研究人员计划进行三项探索性研究。这些研究将在3-4岁、5-7岁、8-9岁、10-12岁和非专业成人年龄组的受试者中进行。研究人员将使用一系列开放式和封闭式问题，探索儿童对不同物种的动物如何出现在地球上的理解，以及他们的理由在多大程度上与智能设计论、进化论和自然生成论等解释雅阁。这些研究还将探讨儿童推理的其他方面，例如他们倾向于认为物种具有固定的本质，以确定这种推理在支持或限制儿童对进化的理解方面可能发挥什么作用。这项创新和智力风险的工作有望开始奠定基础，基于当前的认知理论，在此基础上，一种新的方法来教学的进化论可以建立。

This is a Small Grant for Exploratory Research (SGER) proposal examining children's acquisition of an understanding of evolution. The main goal of the proposal is to carry out the exploratory studies necessary to help articulate a developmental framework for understanding the relationship between children's early conceptual development and their acquisition of evolutionary concepts. The hypothesis underlying this work is that people have difficulty grasping certain evolutionary concepts because these concepts may conflict with people's intuitive concepts and beliefs about adaptation and selection. Evolutionary concepts imply the notion that all species are, in a sense, related. This challenges what may be an intuitive bias in people to think about species as being qualitatively distinct. The investigators propose to conduct three exploratory studies. The studies will be conducted on participants in age-groups of 3-4 years, 5-7 years, 8-9 years, 10-12 years, and lay adults. Using a series of open-ended as well as closed-ended questions, the investigators will explore children's understandings of, for example, how animals of different species appeared on Earth and the extent to which their reasons are in accord with such explanations as Intelligent-Design, Evolutionist, and Spontaneous-Generationist. The studies will also probe other aspects of children's reasoning, such as their tendency to think of species as having a fixed essence, in order to determine what role such reasoning might have in supporting or constraining children's understanding of evolution. This innovative and intellectually risky work promises to begin to lay the groundwork, based on current cognitive theory, upon which a novel approach to the teaching of evolution could be built.