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

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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.