The Development of Children's Teleo-Functional Bias

随着生物技术和医学研究与这个国家的经济和身体健康变得越来越相关，精心构思和精心设计的科学课程的重要性从未如此之大。在这方面，本项目涉及一种思维模式的性质和适当的教学反应，这种思维模式一方面是发展科学素养的先决条件，但另一方面可能对阐述对生物过程的真正科学理解极为有害。远功能推理根据实体和事件服务的目的来解释它们。它是生命科学素养的基础，因为它区分了受过西方教育的成年人对生物与非生物自然现象的概念：虽然成年人认为鼻孔等实体是“为了”特定功能（例如呼吸）而存在的，但他们倾向于认为洞穴等实体是没有目的的，即使它们执行许多活动（例如产生石笋）。然而，尽管它们对绘制基本的科学区分具有中心作用，但大多数非专家关于功能的具体想法对生物学理解构成了障碍。这是因为他们被一种错误的观点所驱动，即自然选择是一种目标导向的过程，类似于有意设计，而不是一种盲目的机制。因此，了解这种科学误解的起源，并尽早设计有效的课程材料来解决它，对于促进终身识字和生物学学习至关重要。为此，本研究的目的是通过实证探索幼儿进入科学教育形成阶段时远功能直觉的本质，并利用这一实证基础作为创新的、探索性的教育干预的基础，向5至8岁的儿童教授自然选择。之所以强调这一点，是因为最近几项调查结果表明需要进行这种工作。首先，目前的研究表明，直到进入小学，孩子们似乎都将各种生物和非生物实体——时钟、狮子、池塘、山、云及其属性——理解为为了某种目的而存在（DiYanni & Kelemen, 2005a; Kelemen, 1999ab, 2003；但参见Keil， 1992）。因此，与成年人不同，学龄前儿童和小学儿童似乎不能沿着远功能线区分生命和非生命的自然现象。其次，研究还表明，幼儿基于目的的归因受到自然现象是有意设计的产物这一直觉的推动（Piaget, 1929; Evans, 2000, 2001; Kelemen, 2004）。因此，幼儿已经表现出推理模式的特征，这些特征被认为是科学理解生物学的持久障碍。在探索儿童拥有这种直觉的可能原因以及对这些想法的潜在教学反应的过程中，本研究旨在作为一个更大研究项目的第一步，该项目与早期儿童教育家和跨学科研究人员的国际专家咨询小组合作，寻求直接将认知发展研究的方法和见解应用于创新和经验丰富的早期科学教学的设计。

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.